EP16 Powers Thrones and Dan Jones

it's hardcore history [Music] so i am a dan jones fan and uh many of you are too no doubt he's one of our finest writers of history for the period in the middle ages you know the fall of rome to the renaissance a lot of stuff that made up what a lot of us grew up with loving i mean knights in shining armor crusades norman saxons i mean this is pretty par for the course for a lot of history fans and um if that's your jam then you need to pick up dan jones's new book powers and thrones he's with us today to talk about it but uh but you've probably already read his stuff the plantagenets was great the wars of the roses crusaders the templars magna carta the book covers the entire period from the fall of rome to the renaissance in the european middle eastern north african sort of zone 656 pages i looked it up covering a thousand years that's audacious isn't it but just like there's a lot of interesting stuff you can glean from a very narrowly focused you know targeted work on a on a small chunk of history so you can really delve into it turn over every stone uh examine it to the nth degree there are advantages to doing the opposite you get much larger sense of how cultures are working together and pinging off each other larger sense of trends impacting over time right they all have their place and and jones's book is one of those that um if you actually retained what's in it it would fill in your foundational knowledge base for a huge chunk of time and a large important region geographically speaking it's a page turner there's a lot of historical figures that we've all fallen in love with that fall into a book like this what i love about it though is is at the same time that it's comforting if you've always been interested in this stuff to read this book it's comforting for me anyway he's got all the new stuff right all the new discoveries all the clarifications all the overturned myths we've talked before about how interesting it is now that the area of historical knowledge is aided not just by historians and archaeologists the people that have always sort of had that as ...