Quiz: Who said it, Tom Holland the writer or Tom Holland the actor?

April 5, 2023, 11:22am

Tom Holland the writer and historian has respectfully asked that the good people of India stop tagging him in photographs of actor Tom Holland from the recent Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) event, a Bollywood night-of-nights. An honest mistake! Two British lads, one who happens to be a medievalist and Gothic enthusiast who has published impressive historic tomes including Dominion, on the Christian revolution, Rubicon, on the Roman empire, and such; and one who has been Spiderman.

How well do you know the Tom Hollands (and the fall of the Roman empire)? Herein, I present a test—do not skip to the answers! Please give each quote the right degree of thought, and note down whether you think it originated with Tom Holland the actor or Tom Holland the historian.

1. How typical of the Greeks to reduce the ideal of shared citizenship to sophistry!

2. I lost around 27lbs by running in a bin bag every day.

3. If you ask me to read a book, I just can’t get my brain to focus on it.

4. The only alternative to liberty—as it had always been—was death.

5. Almost my earliest memory [is of] a dinosaur book I was given when I was three or four.

6. I used to come across sometimes as a bit of a dick.

7. If it’s time for me to say goodbye, then I will do so proudly.

8. You’re not going to like the truth.

9. Even after they had reduced Carthage to an impotent rump, confiscating her provinces, her fleet, her celebrated war-elephants, the Romans continued to dread a Carthaginian recovery.

10. I particularly remember a sense of disappointment that the Garden of Eden hadn’t really featured dinosaurs.

11. My ambition is hubristic enough as it is.

12. I wear a thong. Like a jockstrap thing. I have a thong and a mesh underlay suit.

13. There is nothing particular about man, he is simply part of this world.