Andrew Roberts (historian)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Andrew Roberts (born on January 13, 1963) is a British conservative and historian.
Contents |
[edit] Early life
Roberts attended Cranleigh School from where he was expelled for such pranks as statue painting, chapel roof climbing and rearranging the furniture in the quad.[1] He took a first class honours degree in modern history [2] at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge where he was also an honorary senior scholar. While there he was Chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association.
[edit] Career
Roberts worked between 1985-87 as a corporate broker at Robert Fleming Securities Limited before becoming a freelance journalist and book reviewer. His biography of Lord Salisbury won him the Wolfson History Prize and the James Stern silver pen award for non-fiction. In 2001 he became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Society of Arts. He appears as a regular commentator on British television and radio programmes and contributes to a range of UK publications including The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator.
He is also known to American audiences for his broadcasts on NBC during the funerals of Diana, Princess of Wales and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and the marriage of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. In 2003 he presented a critically acclaimed four-part history series on BBC2 about the secrets of leadership which looked at the different leadership styles of Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King. He wrote a book on Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler's leadership techniques entitled Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership, in which he delivered a rebuttal to many of the assertions made by David Irving, Clive Ponting and Christopher Hitchens concerning Churchill. His A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, a sequel to the four volume work of Winston Churchill, was published in September 2006.
During the invasion of Iraq he emerged as one of the leading UK proponents of the war, arguing on BBC Newsnight that failure to take military action would be tantamount to appeasement.
After reading A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, George W. Bush invited him to lunch at the White House on 28 February 2007. After spending time in the Oval Office, Roberts and his wife dined with Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, the National Security Advisor Steve Hadley, White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and other White House officials.[3]
This was criticized in an April 2007 article in The New Republic by Johann Hari. Hari accused Roberts of supporting massacres against civilians, and British concentration camps built during the Boer War. Hari pointed out Roberts had addressed and praised the Springbok Club, a white supremacist organisation that flies the old South African flag. Roberts responded that he had not realised the Springbok Club was racist [1] and claimed his arguments did not amount to a defence of massacres and the concentration camps, which Hari in turn contested with quotes from Roberts' work.
Roberts was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2000. He is divorced from his first wife with whom he had two children, Henry and Cassia. He is now married to Susan Gilchrist, the senior partner of Brunswick Group, and lives in Belgravia.
[edit] Books
- 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.
- The Aachen Memorandum, London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995 ISBN 0-297-81619-5.
- "Hitler's England What if Germany had invaded Britain in May 1940" pages 281-320 from Virtual History edited by Niall Ferguson, New York: Basic Books, 1997, 1999, ISBN 0-330-35132-X.
- Salisbury: Victorian Titan (1999). ISBN 0-297-81713-2.
- 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 0-297-64607-9.
- Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership (2003). ISBN 0-297-84330-3.
- What Might Have Been (2004). ISBN 0-297-84877-1.
- Waterloo : June 18, 1815 : The Battle For Modern Europe, New York : HarperCollins, 2005, ISBN 0-06-008866-4.
- A History of the English Speaking Peoples since 1900 (2006), ISBN 0297850768
[edit] Notes and references
- Thomas, David (2003). "Churchill, Hitler and me". Daily Telegraph. Retrieved May 1, 2006.
