Summer podcasts, summer reading

I'm sometimes a sucker for the podcasts led by lively, funny, engaging talkers, even when they don't have much to say and take an hour to say it. But when I want a little more meat on the bone, I often log on to what Tides of History, a podcast by an American named Patrick Wyman (Ph.D in history, former sports journalist!), is offering.

When we were planning a trip to Italy, I went to the series Tides had done on the history of Venice, particularly his long interview with Dennis Romero, history prof at Syracuse University and recently the author of Venice: the Remarkable History of the Lagoon City. Wyman likes to rely on -- and often to interview -- serious scholars inclined to go deep into the weeds of their topic, often something in medieval or classical fields or historical archaeology.

After we got back from Italy, I requested Romero's Venice from the library, and -- God bless the Toronto Public Library system -- they ordered a copy and told me I might have to wait for a while. It came through this week, and indeed it's a very good book (pristine copy, too!). Romero has spent a long time in Venice and its archives, seems to know everything about the city, and tells his story pretty well, from prehistory to the "global Venice" of cruise ship bans and depopulation.  

It's eight hundred pages of pretty small print, and I probably won't read every word, but everywhere I dip in, I'm impressed and enlightened. Romero's a dab hand at starting or ending a chapter with a vivid vignette or two: a liberated slave who became a shipowner and enabled his descendants to join the Venetian nobility, or a num writing a furious tract about the cruelty of fathers who imprison their extra and ill-favoured daughters in convents. (Wyman uses a similar technique in his podcasts, always starting with a brief and vivid imagined scene before turning to the solid history; Romero's, however, are all straight from the archives.)

On the strength of that find, let me recommend Wyman's recent "summer readings" episode: in which he proposes seven substantial histories worth reading, mostly recent, only one or two of which I had ever heard of, and skewing to the serious and academic, while also including a couple of more general-market types.  Not all American either!

What's the lively, funny podcast, you ask?  I'm thinking of The Rest is History, a very popular British podcast featuring Tom Holland and Domenic Sandbrook, two hyperarticulate polymath Brits who are pretty entertaining while also being startlingly little-England. (Their series on the Cathars, in which every single scholar they cited was an Englishman writing in English!) Also Empire, with William Dalrymple and jounalist Anita Anand.

Suggestions for history podcasts worth a look out there?