Andrew Roberts

Andrew Roberts’ Background

A British historian and journalist, Professor Andrew Roberts has written and edited twelve books, writes and reviews history books for the Sunday Telegraph, and broadcasts regularly on history and politics for BBC2 and Channel 4. He is an accomplished public speaker and has delivered the White House Lecture, as well as speaking at the likes of Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Princeton Universities, Sandhurst, and the US Army War College.

British historian and journalist, Professor Andrew Roberts, took a first-class honours degree in Modern History at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, from where he is an honorary senior scholar and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD).

He has written and edited twelve books, which have been translated into 18 languages, and appears regularly on radio and television around the world. He also writes for the Sunday Telegraph and reviews history books and biographies for that newspaper as well as The Spectator, Literary Review, Mail on Sunday and Wall Street Journal.

Based in London, Andrew is an accomplished public speaker and has delivered the White House Lecture, as well as speaking at Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Princeton and Stanford Universities, and at Sandhurst, Shrivenham and the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

In 2011, NBC commissioned Andrew to commentate alongside Matt Lauer and Meredith Viera on the Royal Wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton, following his well-received broadcasts at the funerals of Diana, Princess of Wales and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and the wedding of Princes Charles to the Duchess of Cornwall. He also commentated for NBC on The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the birth of Prince George of Cambridge.

He is presently a Visiting Professor at the War Studies Department at King’s College, London and the Lehrman Institute Lecturer at the New-York Historical Society.

Andrew’s biography of Neville Chamberlain’s and Winston Churchill’s foreign secretary, the Earl of Halifax, entitled ‘The Holy Fox’ was published in 1991, to be followed by the controversial, but no less well-received, ‘Eminent Churchillians’ in 1994.

In 1999, he published ‘Salisbury: Victorian Titan’; in 2001, ‘Napoleon and Wellington; and in 2003, ‘Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership’, which coincided with Andrew’s four-part BBC Two history series. In 2004, he edited ‘What might have been’, a collection of twelve ‘What If?’ essays written by distinguished historians.

The publication of ‘A history of the English-speaking peoples since 1900’ brought Andrew an invitation to the White House in 2007, where he delivered the prestigious White House Lecture.

‘Masters and Commanders’ (2008) won the Emery Reves Award of the International Churchill Society and was shortlisted for The Duke of Westminster’s Gold Medal for Military History and The British Army Military Book Award, both of Britain’s two top military history prizes. ‘The Storm of War’ was published in 2009 and reached No.2 on The Sunday Times bestseller list, as well as winning the British Army Military Book Award for 2010.

Andrew is a quondam 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 he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has been elected a Fellow of the Napoleonic Institute and an Honorary Member of the International Churchill Society (UK), and is also a Trustee of the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust and of the Roberts Foundation.

In 2012, Andrew was awarded the William Penn Prize, as well as the British Schools and Universities Club of USA ‘Pride of the Century Award’; he joined the Academic Advisory Committee of the National Churchill Library and Centre at George Washington University, and was the guest curator of the Morgan Library’s ‘Churchill: the Power of Words’ exhibition.

In 2013, the Prime Minister appointed him a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery. During that same year, he was the Merrill Family visiting professor at Cornell University, and in 2014 his biography of Napoleon Bonaparte was published. It has won the Grand Prix of the Fondation Napoleon and The Los Angeles Times Biography Prize 2015. His accompanying documentaries, for BBC Two and Radio 4, have recently been broadcast.