By Elaine Machleder
British Historian Andrew Roberts, elevated to the House of Lords as Andrew Roberts of Belgravia by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has written or edited more than 20 books. His 2018 biography of Winston Churchill, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, became a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller. The New York Times called it, “the best single-volume biography of Churchill yet written.”
Henry Kissinger called Roberts “a great historian who’s always relevant to contemporary thinking and contemporary problems.”
Roberts will be the Advocates for Balance at Chautauqua speaker during Week 9 of the Chautauqua season. He will speak on August 21 at 3pm in the Hotel Athenaeum parlor. The title of his speech is “Britain Yesterday and Today.”
ABC was founded in 2018, to present speakers with a more traditional point of view than the views usually presented by the Chautauqua Institution. Their mission is “To achieve a balance of speakers in a mutually civil and respectful environment consistent with the historic mission of Chautauqua”. ABC events are not listed in official Chautauqua Institution publications. But their talks are well-attended and ABC has more than 700 supporters.
Roberts regards Churchill as the greatest prime minister of modern times, followed closely by Margaret Thatcher. He wrote that Churchill showed foresight in many instances: in recognizing the dangers of the Nazi regime, and then warning about the threat posed by the Soviet Union and the coming Cold War in his 1946 iron curtain speech. As prime minister, he traveled 110,000 miles outside the United Kingdom during World War II. That was more than the other leaders combined. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was disabled, and Stalin left the Soviet Union only once during the war.
For the Churchill biography, Queen Elizabeth granted Roberts access to her father’s diaries.
In his book about King George III: The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III, Roberts wrote that George III had been unfairly stigmatized by ascribing his maladies to defects in his personality. Roberts who had access to 20,000 pages of recently published papers, discovered that the king probably suffered several bouts of a bipolar disorder. He said the king had been disrespected in the popular media and portrayed as a figure of ridicule.
“The founding fathers were an incredibly talented group of people,” he said. “Poor George III was stuck with some very third-rate politicians and soldiers.” The king never bought or sold slaves and he did not invest in companies that did. In 1807, he signed legislation abolishing the slave trade, yet 42 out of the 56 signatories of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves.
It suited Americans to dismiss George as a tyrant, he said. If the US and the UK had remained together, “it would have made it impossible for the kaiser to have gone to war against Britain in 1914, there wouldn’t have been a Russian revolution, no Nazis, no Holocaust,” he said.
Roberts chaired the Conservative Party’s Advisory Panel on the Teaching of History in Schools in 2005. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society. He has been elected a Fellow of the Napoleonic Institute and is an honorary member of the International Churchill Society (UK).
Roberts is also a trustee of the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust. He is a founding member of the Friends of Israel Initiative, which aims to counter the growing efforts to delegitimize the state of Israel and its right to live in peace within safe and defensible borders.
Roberts is presently the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a Visiting Professor at the War Studies Department at King’s College, London, and the Lehrman Institute Lecturer at the New York Historical Society.
Roberts, who was born in 1963, earned a first-class honours degree in modern history at Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge, in Cambridge, England, from where he is an Honorary senior scholar and Ph.D.
For those unable to attend the lecture in person, it will be available later for on demand viewing, along with previous ABC talks, on the ABC website: abcatchq.com