When Dan Snow, the world’s hottest historian (sorry, Mary Beard), tells us that ‘a hard wheel on a hard rail produces much less friction than a normal wheel on a muddy track’, we hear the word ‘hard’ and we hear the word ‘friction’ and the rest is white noise.
It’s not because we don’t find his latest show, History of Railways, deeply fascinating (coal, steam, wheels, um… rails — we’re big fans), but he is so impossibly handsome we simply can’t be expected to concentrate. Dan, son of king of the swingometer Peter Snow, nephew of our favourite jazzy sock-wearing newsreader Jon, and known to his 40,600 Twitter followers as @thehistoryguy, has the kind of chiselled jaw and elegantly tousled hair that make us reach for the smelling salts. It hasn’t gone unnoticed that Dan’s go-to casual blue T-shirt, which on any less of an übermensch would look shabby, delicately clings to his ‘Ooh, have you been working out?’ pectorals (he won the Boat Race with Oxford in 2000 — we looked him up). The fact that it’s teamed with a safari jacket he picked up at Rohan makes us love him even more. This rugged Snowman is a class swot at heart and all the sexier for it. Choo choo!
