[Tom Holland @ Charlie Hopkinson]
Quite a scoop for Bath Literature Festival 2026, which has announced its first event – welcoming Tom Holland, the award-winning star of the world’s most downloaded history podcast, The Rest is History. Tickets for what promises to be a fascinating evening are on sale now.
Travel back to the Roman Empire as Tom Holland celebrates his translation for Penguin Classics of Suetonius’s influential Lives of the Twelve Caesars.
Ancient Rome was the supreme arena where emperors had no choice but to fight and to thrill. To rule as a Caesar was to stand as an actor upon the great stage of the world.
No historian understood this more clearly than Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, who lived and worked in Rome in AD 121, and whose astonishing narratives bring the emperors’ daily struggles to life.
Holland’s electrifying new translation of this, one of the most influential works of history ever written, delves into the lives of Caesar, Augustus, Caligula, and Nero, exposing their shortfalls, laying bare their sex scandals, and revealing their outrageous tastes, foibles and eccentricities. His Lives of the Caesars transports us to a time and culture at once familiar and utterly alien to our own.
Already an acclaimed, bestselling author when the chart-topping podcast The Rest is History made superstars of him and his co-host Dominic Sandbrook, Tom Holland guides us through history with humour, insight and expertise.
Tom Holland is at The Forum on Friday, 22 May, at 7 pm.
Tickets: https://bathboxoffice.org.uk/whats-on/tom-holland-8j3v
Or by phone from Bath Box Office: 01225 463362.
More news about 2026 festivals in the new year
The programme for both the Bath Literature Festival (Sat 16 May – Sun 24 May) and Bath International Music Festival (Sat 30 May – Sun 7 June) will be announced in the new year.
