Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia

Andrew Roberts
Born	(1963-01-13) 13 January 1963 London, England
Occupation(s)	Historian and journalist
Spouse	Susan Gilchrist
Website	www.andrew-roberts.net

Andrew Roberts (born 13 January 1963) is an English historian and journalist.

Background

Roberts was born in London, England, the son of Simon (a business executive) from Cobham, Surrey, and Katie Roberts. Simon Roberts inherited Job's Dairy milk business and owned the United Kingdom contingent of Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants.

Roberts was raised in the Church of England (Anglican) and briefly attended Cranleigh School until he was expelled for a variety of misdemeanours. Roberts obtained a first class honours BA degree in Modern History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1985, where he is an honorary senior scholar. Roberts began his post-graduate career in corporate finance as an investment banker and private company director with the London merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co., where he worked from 1985 to 1988.

He is divorced from his first wife with whom he had two children, Henry and Cassia, who live in Edinburgh. Roberts is married to Susan Gilchrist, senior partner of the corporate communications firm Brunswick Group and a Governor of the South Bank Centre. He lives in Belgravia.

Authorship

The first of Roberts' books was the biography of Neville Chamberlain's and Winston Churchill's foreign secretary, the Earl of Halifax, entitled The Holy Fox, and published in 1991. Roberts provided a revisionist account of Lord Halifax, a one-time viceroy to India and the Foreign Secretary in Prime Minister Chamberlain's government. Long charged with appeasement, along with his prime minister, Roberts asserts that Halifax in fact began to move his government away from that policy vis-à-vis Hitler's Germany, following the 1938 Munich crisis.

This work was followed by Eminent Churchillians, in 1994, a collection of essays about friends and enemies of Churchill. A large part of the book is an attack on Lord Mountbatten of Burma and other prominent members of the elite.

In 1999, he published Salisbury: Victorian Titan, the authorised biography of the Victorian prime minister the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, which won the Wolfson History Prize and the James Stern Silver Pen Award for Non-Fiction. In September 2001, Napoleon and Wellington, an investigation into the relationship between the two great generals, was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and was the subject of the lead review in all but one of Britain's national newspapers.

January 2003 saw the publication of Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership, which coincided with Roberts's four-part BBC2 history series. In the book, which addresses the leadership techniques of Hitler and Churchill, he delivered a rebuttal to many of the assertions made by Clive Ponting and Christopher Hitchens concerning Churchill.

Also in 2003, he became a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In 2004, he edited What Might Have Been, a collection of twelve "What If?" essays written by distinguished historians and journalists, including Antonia Fraser, Norman Stone, Amanda Foreman, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Conrad Black, and Anne Somerset. In 2005, Roberts published Waterloo: Napoleon's Last Gamble, which was published in America as Waterloo: The Battle for Modern Europe.

His A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, a sequel to the four volume work of Churchill, was published in September 2006 and won the Intercollegiate Studies OInstitute Book Award. Masters and Commanders describes how four titanic figures shaped the grand strategy of the West during the Second World War. It was published in November, 2008 and won the International Churchill Society Book Award and was shortlisted for two other military history book prizes. The Art of War is a two-volume chronological survey of the greatest military commanders in history. It was compiled by a team of historians, including Robin Lane Fox, Tom Holland, John Julius Norwich, Jonathan Sumption and Felipe Fernández-Armesto, working under the general editorship of Roberts.

The Storm of War was published in August 2009. It is Roberts best selling title to date and reached number two in The Sunday Times bestseller list. The book was awarded British Army Military Book of the Year 2010.

Journalism and lecturing

The second strand of Roberts published output are articles in leading national newspapers, most notably, the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and their Sunday editions and also the Daily Express and The Sunday Times.

In addition, since 1990, Roberts has addressed hundreds of diverse institutional and academic audiences in many countries, including a lecture to George W. Bush at the White House.

Roberts has appeared on US television during royal funerals and weddings. He first came to prominence in the USA due to acting as an expert on the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, and he was later in a similar role during the CNN broadcast of the death of the Queen Mother and on the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. In Britain in 2003, he presented The Secrets of Leadership, a four-part history series on BBC2 about the secrets of leadership which looked at the different leadership styles of Churchill, Hitler, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Roberts is a Director of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation in New York, a founder member of José Maria Aznar’s Friends of Israel Initiative, and in 2010 chaired the Hessell-Tiltman Award for Non-Fiction.

Roberts is a judge on the Elizabeth Longford Historical Biography Prize. He chaired the Conservative Party's Advisory Panel on the Teaching of History in Schools in 2005, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has also been elected a Fellow of the Napoleonic Institute and an Honorary Member of the International Churchill Society (UK). He is a Trustee of the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust and of the Roberts Foundation.

Support for the Iraq War and the "Fourth World War"

During the build up to the Iraq War Roberts supported the proposed invasion, arguing that anything less would be tantamount to appeasement. He strongly supported Tony Blair's foreign policy, saying that Blair displayed "astonishing leadership" and compared him to Winston Churchill in the 1930s. In 2003, he wrote "for Churchill, apotheosis came in 1940; for Tony Blair, it will come when Iraq is successfully invaded and hundreds of weapons of mass destruction are unearthed from where they have been hidden by Saddam's henchmen", and commented on the human cost of the Iraq War, saying that Britain has "lost fewer soldiers than on a normal weekend on the Western Front".

He has defended the use of waterboarding by the Central Intelligence Agency, writing that "sometimes the defense of liberty requires making some pretty unpalatable decisions". He has said that the Iraq War is being fought by the English speaking peoples as "an existential war for the survival of their way of life" and that "this struggle against Islamofascism is the fourth world war" [the Cold War being the third world war] in which "the English-speaking peoples find themselves in the forefront of protecting civilization", just as they were against the Nazis. He believes that history will judge George Bush a success.

Criticisms

Roberts' 2006 work, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900, was critically acclaimed in some sections of the media but The Economist drew attention to some historical, geographical, and typographical errors and provided a generally scathing review of the book. However his book The Storm of War, published in 2009, was described in the Economist as "magnificent".

See also

• Anglosphere

Publications

• The Holy Fox: A Biography of Lord Halifax, London : Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991 ISBN 0-297-81133-9.
• Eminent Churchillians, London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994 ISBN 0-297-81247-5; Simon & Schuster, 1994, ISBN 9780671769406
• The Aachen Memorandum, London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995 ISBN 0-297-81619-5.
• Salisbury: Victorian Titan, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999, ISBN 9780297817130
• The House of Windsor, Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press, 2000, ISBN 0-520-22803-0.
• Napoleon and Wellington : The Battle of Waterloo—And the Great Commanders Who Fought It. New York: Simon & Schuster. 2001. ISBN 0297646079. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
• Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003, ISBN 9780297843306
• What Might Have Been, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004, ISBN 9780297848776
• Waterloo: June 18, 1815: The Battle for Modern Europe. New York: HarperCollins. 2005. ISBN 9780060088668.
• A History of the English Speaking Peoples since 1900, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006, ISBN 9780297850762
• Masters and Commanders: How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke Won the War in the West (2008), Allen Lane, ISBN 978-0-713-99969-3 (UK edition); Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945 (2009), Harper, ISBN 978-0061228575 (US edition).
• The Art of War: Great Commanders of the Ancient and Medieval World, Quercus, 2008, ISBN 9781847245151
• The Art of War: Great Commanders of the Modern World Since 1600, Quercus, 2009, ISBN 9781847245168
• The Storm of War: a New History of the Second World War. Allen Lane. 2009. ISBN 9780713999709.; HarperCollins, 2011, ISBN 9780061228599

Contributor

• Virtual History (1997) One Essay
• What If? (1999) One Essay
• The Kings and Queens of England (2000) One Chapter
• The Railway King: A Biography of George Hudson (2001) Introduction
• Historian’s Holiday (2001) Introduction
• What If? Volume 2 (2001) One Essay
• Protestant Island (2001) Introduction
• Spirit of England (2001) Introduction
• The Secret History of P.W.E. (2002) Introduction
• Rich Dust (2002) Introduction
• A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (2002) Introduction
• Spirit of England (2002) Preface
• Historian's Holiday (2002) Preface
• What Ifs of American History? (2003) One Essay
• The Multicultural Experiment (2003) One Chapter
• British Military Greats (2004) One Chapter
• Lives for Sale (2004) One Chapter
• Hitler's Death: Russia's Last Great Secret from the Files of the KGB (2005) Foreword
• Liberty and Livelihood (2005) One Chapter
• The Eagle’s Last Triumph (2006) Introduction
• The Eagle's Last Triumph : Napoleon's Victory at Ligny, June 1815 (2006) Foreword
• Postcards from the Russian Revolution (2008) Introduction
• Postcards of Political Icons (2008) Introduction
• Postcards from Checkpoint Charlie (2008) Introduction
• A Week at Waterloo (2008) Introduction
• The Future of National Identity (2008) One Chapter
• Postcards from the Trenches (2008) Introduction
• Postcards from Utopia: The Art of Political Propaganda (2009) Introduction
• Postcards of Lost Royals (2009) Introduction
• Napoleon Bonaparte by Georges Lefevre(2010) Introduction
• Letters from Vicky: The Letters of Queen Victoria to Vicky, Empress of Germany 1858-1901 (2011) Introduction and Selection
• A History of the World in 100 Weapons (2011) Introduction

External links

• Official website
• Web page at Capel & Land
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• 'The Dark Side of Andrew Roberts' from the Independent newspaper
• BBC Article by Roberts about Hitler and Churchill
• The History Man Who Loves to Party, Oliver Marre, The Guardian, 26 July 2009
• Andrew Roberts is the social historian (Evening Standard)
• Booknotes interview with Roberts on Napoleon & Wellington: The Battle of Waterloo and the Great Commanders Who Fought It, January 12, 2003.