Wednesday, May 18, 2011, at 12:00 Noon, I am hosting my show, The Advocates on WVOX- 1460 AM, my guest is Andrews Roberts, historian and author of The Storm of War, a new history of the Second World War. He was previously a guest on The Advocates on August 18, 2010.
Andrew Roberts is the author of the biography of Neville Chamberlain's and Winston Churchill's foreign secretary, the Earl of Halifax, entitled The Holy Fox, which was published in 1991. 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 authorized 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.
In 2003, the publication of Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership, 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, including Antonia Fraser, Norman Stone, Amanda Foreman, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Conrad Black, and Anne Somerset. In 2005, he 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 Institute 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. Under his leadership, 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.
The Storm of War was published in August 2009 and as a best seller it reached number two in The London Sunday Times bestseller list. The book was awarded British Army Military Book of the Year 2010
He has appeared on US television during royal funerals and weddings. He first came to prominence in the USA 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. He also served as CNN’s commentator on the weddings of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles and Prince William and Catherine Middleton.
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 He 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.
He is also a judge for 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.
Andrew Roberts was born in London, England He earned his BA degree in Modern History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he is an honorary senior scholar and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). In 2011 he was awarded a doctorate by Cambridge University.
He 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.
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