Andrew Roberts

The New York Times commented that 'All told, it must surely be the best single-volume biography of Churchill yet written.’. The National Book Review also noted that the book was '‘widely praised as the best single-volume biography of Winston Churchill ever written' and added that 'historian and commentator Roberts draws on previously unavailable journals and notes for the robust, engrossing, and nuanced history of the great British leader.’.

Elsewhere, his work has sometimes been criticised by, for example, The Economist who described one book as "a giant political pamphlet larded with its author's prejudices, with sneers at those who do not share them and with errors". However, much of Roberts' work, including his 2018 biography of Winston Churchill, has been widely praised; the Sunday Times, for example, called the Churchill biography 'Undoubtedly the best single-volume life of Churchill ever written.'

Praise additionally came from fellow historian Jay Winik: ‘With his customary flair and keen historical eye, Andrew Roberts has delivered the goods again. This could well be the best single volume biography of Napoleon in English for the last four decades. A tour de force that belongs on every history-lover’s bookshelf!’ Historian Bernard Cornwell describes the book as 'Simply dynamite ... [Napoleon was] a mass of contradictions and Roberts's book encompasses all the evidence to give a brilliant portrait of the man. The book, as it needs to be, is massive, yet the pace is brisk and it's never overwhelmed by the scholarly research, which was plainly immense ... Roberts suggests looking at Europe for the Emperor's monument, but this magnificent biography is not a bad place to start.'

In 2018, Roberts produced a biography of Churchill entitled Churchill: Walking with Destiny. Dovetailing with Roberts' previous work on the Second World War and its related major figures, the book received praise from a number of publications. The Financial Times wrote, "Anecdotes sparkle like gems throughout Roberts’s book, an exhaustive but fluent text that draws on a wider range of sources than the typical Churchill biography." Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer included the book among the 'Books of the Year' and said that "Roberts triumphed over my skepticism with his riveting account of the extraordinary life of the most remarkable individual to have lived at No 10." Stephen Pollard, in The Jewish Chronicle, lauded the book as "the most superb one-volume biography I have ever read— of anyone." Pollard additionally remarked, "Roberts manages something I thought impossible. He has given us a new, ground-breaking portrait of the man whom many consider to be the greatest ever Englishman. This is a simply wonderful book. A living, poetic, stirring yet thought-provoking portrait of a giant, it will be regarded as a classic for generations to come.’.

Roberts has worked with think tank organisations such as the Centre for Policy Studies and the Centre for Social Cohesion. He additionally has maintained personal friendships with several British political and social figures such as David Cameron, Michael Gove and Oliver Letwin. In February 2016, he was appointed President of the Cambridge University Conservative Association.

In terms of more recent history, Roberts whole-heartedly embraced Thatcherism. He has remained a staunch backer of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her socio-political legacy. In Roberts' opinion, Thatcher's insight to push the UK into a path in which it kept out of the Euro while still having strong ties to European economies has been validated by the Eurozone crisis in the aftermath of the world economic recession. After Tony Blair resigned as Prime Minister, Roberts assessed him as an "exemplary war leader" with his "vigorous prosecution of the War against Terror", which would leave him regarded as a "highly successful prime minister". In the 2016 UK Referendum on the EU, Roberts backed a Leave vote.

In 2014, Roberts wrote Napoleon the Great (the American edition is titled Napoleon: A Life), which was awarded the 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for best biography. Published by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books UK, (and by Viking Press in the US), the book attempts to give a fair-minded contemporary assessment of the life of Napoleon as well as his legacy for France and the rest of the western world. In this biography, Roberts seeks to evoke Napoleon's tremendous energy, both physical and intellectual, and the attractiveness of his personality, even to his enemies. The book argues against many long-held historical opinions, including the myth of a great romance with Joséphine. She took a lover immediately after their marriage, as Roberts shows, and Napoleon in fact had three times as many mistresses as he acknowledged. Roberts goes through fifty-three of Napoleon's sixty battlefields, and he additionally evaluates a gigantic new French edition of Napoleon's letters, aiming to create a complete re-evaluation of the man.

Like The Storm of War, Roberts's life of Napoleon received critical praise from a wide range of publications. For example, journalist Jeremy Jennings wrote for Standpoint in October 2014 that "Napoleon could have had few biographers more dedicated to their subject." Jennings additionally labelled the book a "richly detailed and sure-footed reappraisal of the man, his achievements—and failures—and the extraordinary times in which he lived". The book earned the Prix du Jury des Grands Prix de la Fondation Napoléon for 2014, an award given by the historical organisation Fondation Napoléon.

An accompanying television series based around Roberts' Hitler and Churchill ran on BBC2, with its first episode being broadcast on 7 March 2013. Roberts remarked that he felt grateful for the BBC's support of his work and their unwillingness to cut corners when it came to exploring history in detail, quipping as well about the group's wardrobe policy, "Courtesy of this programme, I now have two Armani suits upstairs."

In announcing in 2013 that it would present a three-part television series based on Roberts's analysis of Napoleon's life and legacy, BBC Two declared in its press release that "Roberts sets out to shed new light on the emperor... an extraordinary, gifted military commander and a mesmeric leader whose private life was littered with disappointments and betrayals." However, the series has had mixed reviews. The Daily Telegraph declared it "unconvincing", saying "there was no getting away from Roberts’s regular lapses into hero-worship," and "Roberts’s remarks on the refreshing qualities of dictatorship made me wonder if he had taken leave of his senses".

During the autumn of 2013, Roberts served as the inaugural Merrill Family visiting professor in history at Cornell University. He taught a course entitled "Great European Leaders of the 19th and 20th Centuries and their Influence on History." He's additionally spoke in many other American universities such as the University of Montana.

His public commentary has appeared in several periodicals such as The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator. Roberts himself is possibly best known internationally for his 2009 non-fiction work The Storm of War, which covers historical factors of the Second World War such as Hitler's rise to power and the organisation of Nazi Germany. The book has been lauded by several publications such as The Economist, and it additionally received the British Army Military Book of the Year Award for 2010.

The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War came out in August 2009. A detailed look at the history of events behind the Second World War and various key elements within it such as the nature of Nazi Germany's rule, the book received large popular success. Being perhaps Roberts' best-known work to date, it reached number two in The Sunday Times bestseller list in particular. The book additionally earned the British Army Military Book of the Year award for 2010.

Although Roberts's 2006 work A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900 won critical acclaim from some sections of the media, The Economist drew attention to some historical, geographical and typographical errors, as well presenting a generally scathing review of the book. The newspaper referred to the work as "a giant political pamphlet larded with its author's prejudices". More generally, Reba Soffer described him in 2009 as "devoted ...to public, polemical conservatism as well as to historical revisionism".

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.

Roberts wrote in 2003 "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." When such weapons were not found, Roberts still defended the invasion for larger strategic reasons while arguing that his past views were based on credible assessments from "the French, Chinese, Israeli and Russian intelligence agencies" as well as other sources.

January 2003 saw the publication of Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership. 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 historians and journalists, including Robert Cowley, Antonia Fraser, Norman Stone, Amanda Foreman, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Lord Black of Crossharbour and Anne Somerset. In 2005, Roberts published Waterloo: Napoleon's Last Gamble, which was published in America as Waterloo: The Battle for Modern Europe.

In 1999, Roberts published Salisbury: Victorian Titan, a biography of the Victorian era politician and then Prime Minister Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury. Historian Michael Korda praised the work as "a masterpiece about one of the greatest and most able Tory political figures of the Victorian age". The book additionally 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 generals, was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and was the subject of the lead review in all but one of Britain's national newspapers.

Roberts has appeared on US television during royal funerals and weddings. He first came to prominence in the United States due to acting as an expert on the funeral of Princess Diana, 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 BBC 2 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.

In 1996 Andrew Roberts offered his "personal view" of the Suez crisis in an Open Media production for BBC TV. The Radio Times described the programme: "Forty years after Eden's decision to deploy troops against the Egyptians, Andrew Roberts argues that the former prime minister should be congratulated, not chastised, for fighting to protect British assets".

In 1995 Roberts published The Aachen Memorandum, a thriller novel based on Britain and its relationship with a fictionalised European Union.

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 Admiral of the Fleet Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma and other prominent members of the elite. The title is an obvious allusion to the famous and similarly combative book of biographies Eminent Victorians.

Journalist Johann Hari alleged that Roberts' writings defended the Amritsar massacre, the concentration camps for Afrikaners during the Anglo-Boer War and mass internments in Ireland. Hari also wrote that Roberts addressed the expatriate South African Springbok Club that flies the pre-1994 South African national flag and calls for "the re-establishment of civilised rule throughout the African continent". Roberts responded by saying that he did not realise the Springbok Club was racist when he took on the speaking engagement.

The first of Roberts' books was the biography of Neville Chamberlain's and Winston Churchill's foreign secretary, Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax, entitled The Holy Fox, and published in 1991. Roberts provided a revisionist account of Wood, a one-time Viceroy of India and the Foreign Secretary in Chamberlain's government. Halifax has been charged with appeasement, along with Chamberlain, but Roberts argues that Halifax in fact began to move his government away from that policy vis-à-vis Hitler's Germany, following the 1938 Munich Crisis.

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

Roberts was born in Hammersmith, west London, the son of Kathleen (née  Hillery-Collings) and business executive Simon Roberts. Simon Roberts, from Cobham, Surrey, inherited the Job's Dairy milk business and also owned the United Kingdom contingent of Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants. His parents would later sell their interest in the aforementioned milk business in 1987. A prolific reader as a child, he soon gained a passion for history, particularly for dramatic works relating to "battles, wars, assassinations and death".

Roberts studied at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and he went on to chair the Cambridge University Conservative Association. He earned a first class honours B.A. degree in Modern History at Gonville and Caius College in 1985, where he is an honorary senior scholar and honorary PhD. Roberts began his 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 published his first historical book in 1991.

Andrew Roberts FRHistS FRSL (born 13 January 1963) is a British historian and journalist. He is a Visiting Professor at the Department of War Studies, King's College London, a Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Lehrman Institute Distinguished Lecturer at the New York Historical Society. Roberts was educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he earned a first-class degree in Modern History.

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 Institute Book Award. Masters and Commanders describes how four figures shaped the 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.

One claim made by Roberts in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900 was that Harvard historian Caroline Elkins had committed "blood libels against Britain" in her Pulitzer prize-winning book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya. Elkins was subsequently vindicated when files released by the National Archives showed that abuses were described as "distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia" by the Solicitor General of the time. The Foreign Secretary William Hague subsequently announced compensation for the first round of victims with statements that the British government "recognises that Kenyans were subjected to torture and other forms of ill-treatment" and "sincerely regrets that these abuses took place" during the Kenya Emergency.