WRITER

Tom Holland

1968 - Today

Tom Holland

Thomas Holland (born 5 January 1968) is an English author and popular historian who has published best-selling books on topics including classical and medieval history, and the origins of Islam. He has worked with the BBC to create and host historical television documentaries, and presented the radio series Making History. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Tom Holland has received more than 26,230,576 page views. His biography is available in 20 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 19 in 2019). Tom Holland is the 7,103rd most popular writer (down from 6,332nd in 2019), the 7,005th most popular biography from United Kingdom (down from 6,291st in 2019) and the 739th most popular British Writer.

Memorability Metrics

26M
Page Views (PV)
32.99
Historical Popularity Index (HPI)
20
Languages Editions (L)
1.39
Effective Languages (L*)
4.00
Coefficient of Variation (CV)

Notable Works

Rubicon

Roman Empire, History

A vivid historical account of the social world of Rome as it moved from republic to empire. In 49 B.C., the seven hundred fifth year since the founding of Rome, Julius Caesar crossed a small border river called the Rubicon and plunged Rome into cataclysmic civil war. Tom Holland’s enthralling account tells the story of Caesar’s generation, witness to the twilight of the Republic and its bloody transformation into an empire. From Cicero, Spartacus, and Brutus, to Cleopatra, Virgil, and Augustus, here are some of the most legendary figures in history brought thrillingly to life. Combining verve and freshness with scrupulous scholarship, Rubicon is not only an engrossing history of this pivotal era but a uniquely resonant portrait of a great civilization in all its extremes of self-sacrifice and rivalry, decadence and catastrophe, intrigue, war, and world-shaking ambition.

2003

Deliver Us from Evil

1997

Persian fire

Nonfiction, Salamis, Battle of, Greece, 480 B.C., History

In 480 B.C., Xerxes, the King of Persia, led an invasion of mainland Greece. Its success should have been a formality. For seventy years, victory--rapid, spectacular victory--had seemed the birthright of the Persian Empire. In the space of a single generation, they had swept across the Near East, shattering ancient kingdoms, storming famous cities, putting together an empire which stretched from India to the shores of the Aegean. As a result of those conquests, Xerxes ruled as the most powerful man on the planet. Yet somehow, astonishingly, against the largest expeditionary force ever assembled, the Greeks of the mainland managed to hold out. The Persians were turned back. Greece remained free. Had the Greeks been defeated in the epochal naval battle at Salamis, not only would the West have lost its first struggle for independence and survival, but it is unlikely that there would ever have been such an entity as the West at all.Tom Holland's brilliant new book describes the very first "clash of Empires" between East and West. As he did in the critically praised Rubicon, he has found extraordinary parallels between the ancient world and our own. There is no other popular history that takes in the entire sweep of the Persian Wars, and no other classical historian, academic or popular, who combines scholarly rigor with novelistic depth with a worldly irony in quite the fashion that Tom Holland does.

2005

Tom Holland's Untold Tales

Horror, Sci-Fi, Science Fiction

A set of 4 e-books by writer/director Tom Holland (Fright Night, Child's Play), which he adapted from unfilmed scripts for his low-budget anthology web series "Tom Holland's Twisted Tales."

2013

Lord of the Dead

Poets, Vampires, Fiction

1996