#773: Andrew Roberts on The Habits of Churchill, Lessons from Napoleon, and The Holy Fire Inside Great Leaders

27:35Or did he think about risk differently than other people? And that is part of what allowed him to implement it. He'd taken huge risks. He was 26 years old. And according to the Churchill view of life, you know, you can take risks when you're 26 years old because people will forgive you. Actually, the French Revolution government would not have forgiven Napoleon if he'd lost the army of Italy in 1796. But nonetheless, he was a huge risk taker. He would attack when normal generals would have fallen back. He was very lucky in that he was fighting, he was 26, he was fighting generals who were Austrian generals who were in their 70s.

28:15He used to hit the hinge of enemy forces. If you have in an Austrian Sardinian army, for example, he would hit the point between the Austrians and the Sardinians, pushing them both back along their own supply lines and so on. He used psychology a great deal, trying to get into the minds of the generals he was opposed to. He was a great chooser of lieutenants, of divisional commanders and people who he felt he could trust. Superb sense of timing as well in a battle. He was, as I say, the sort of exemplar of so many of the leadership tropes. do you think he would have viewed his decisions from the outside that look risky as risky?

28:59If someone takes sort of uncalculated risks over and over again, then you could call them reckless, but at least at face value, that's not maybe the adjective I would use. So I'm just - Yeah, but they came off. This is the thing. In the Italian campaign, this first great campaign of is, he hardly lost a battle. He fought 20 and sort of won 19 of them. So if you do that, even though you have taken risks, it's a sort of force multiplier in a sense. You wind up thinking that they aren't as risky. He did believe in luck, which was very important. He famously said that he wanted his marshals to be lucky and he would promote people if he thought they were lucky.

29:39And that, of course, runs against everything that we 21st century rationalists can possibly believe in. But, you know, it worked for him. Yeah, it seems to have worked. Until it didn't. Until it doesn't. Of course. Until it doesn't. Yeah, so... Promoted the unlucky guy. The decision in 1812 to march on Moscow was hugely risky. And, of course, it didn't pay off. Is it true that you have a signed letter from Aldous Huxley? I do. All right, now Aldous Huxley, I believe... Aldous as we English... Aldous. God, you know, I've realized the longer I spend in England, I really need to... I think I should take TOEFL classes, test of English as a foreign language.

30:20I need to brush up on the mother tongue, as it were. He died, if I'm not wrong, the year you were born. I think it was. Why do you have that letter? And what does the letter say? The letter actually was written from Los Angeles, where he was living in the 1950s. It was in 1959. And somebody just wrote to him asking for his autograph. And obviously also asked, I don't have the letter from the autograph hunter, but he obviously asked for some sort of deep, meaningful thought. And the deep and meaningful thought that Huxley gave him, and I'm a huge admirer of Huxley, Eilus and Garza, and obviously Brave New Worlds and so on, wonderful books.

31:03And he said in this letter that men do not learn much from the lessons of history is one of the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach us. And that is so true, isn't it? I mean, there's not a book that I've written. I've written 20 books. There's not a book that I've written. And I haven't looked across at that framed letter in my study and thought, wow, that is just so perceptive. I have a question about the subtitle of your biography on Churchill, which I believe is Walking with Destiny. You mentioned this holy fire, I think is the term you used earlier. But do many of the leaders you've studied have this belief, and I may not be wording this the best way, but of being chosen by destiny in some fashion?

31:49The phrase comes from his remark in the last chapter of the last few pages of his war memoirs, the first volume of his war memoirs, The Gathering Storm, wonderful book. And he's referring to the day that he became prime minister, the day he was appointed by the king as prime minister, which happened to be, coincidentally, as it turned out, because Hitler didn't know he was going to become prime minister on the same day that Hitler invaded in the West, invaded Belgium and Luxembourg and Holland shortly afterwards, of course, to invade France. And he said, I felt as if I were walking with destiny and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.

32:31And he had a profound sense of personal destiny. Now, you and I might think, as 21st century rationalists, that this is a bit sort of mad to think that you're preordained to save, in this case, Britain and civilisation. If you said that to me, that that was your belief about yourself, I would think that you were clinically insane. But enough things had happened to Churchill in his life. He had had so many close brushes with death that it's not insane to think that. But it's not by any means just... And Napoleon also felt that he had a star to guide him. And he had the luck that we spoke about earlier, but that luck, who was a woman in his case, was somebody he needed to woo and to try to seduce.

33:19And of course, in 1812, she turns her back on him and he speaks of her in that sense, which is also a pretty insane way to look at life, isn't it? But they were both, as I mentioned earlier, devotees of the ancients, of Caesar and Alexander the Great, both of whom also, of course, had this driving sense of personal destiny. And so it does exist in people. If you could, I'll give you two options, stand in, meaning take the place of one of the people you've studied in depth, or just simply witness them in a given moment or day or period in their lives, what might you choose? Well, first of all, I wouldn't want to stand in their place at all.

34:04I know that I don't have the intestinal fortitude of these extraordinary people. But it would be the day that I just mentioned. It would be the 10th of May 1940, the day that Hitler's invading, the cabinet meets, and recognizes that Neville Chamberlain is not the man to continue on the war now that it's turned to the West. And the meetings that took place the previous day and that day, whereby Neville Chamberlain goes to the king and suggests Churchill. And the king wasn't terribly excited about Churchill either, because they'd fallen out over the abdication crisis, and he thought Churchill was a bit of a loose cannon.

34:43But nonetheless, he's willing to call Churchill. Churchill then goes to Buckingham Palace and becomes prime minister, and comes back and starts to organise his government as the news is coming in of the German success and victories on the Western Front. I mean, this is what a day. What a day in history that must have been. So if I could be a fly on the wall any day in history, that's the day that I would choose. Can we just go back though to this concept of a sense of destiny? Because of course it isn't just great men as in good men, positive forces in history that has this. Adolf Hitler also had a sense of destiny when he was in providence and luck and being watched over by bigger forces and so on.

35:29When he survived his assassination attempt on the 20th of July, 1944, when you remember Stauffenberg moves the briefcase with a bomb in it to a point in the table that just shreds Hitler's trousers when it goes off and doesn't kill him. He also put it down to providence that he had been allowed to survive and therefore to stay in charge. And the Fuhrer was going to save the Fatherland and the Reich. So it's not something I don't want your viewers and listeners to come away thinking that it's a really good thing to think that you're being watched over by a more powerful force who's saving you to become the world-saving figure.

36:07You can cut a lot of different ways. I think of David Koresh and cult leaders and Jim Jones down in Ghana or wherever he was. All of these frauds and crooks and con men use it as well.

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37:51Are there any particular weaknesses or pathologies or failures that come to mind in, say, Churchill and Napoleon or others who helped to make them ultimately great in the ways that they were great? Oh, definitely. Definitely. The key thing is learning from mistakes, which not all politicians do. I need to scarcely point out that Churchill certainly did. He made mistake after mistake. He got female suffrage wrong, the abdication crisis that I mentioned earlier. He joined the gold standard at the wrong time, at the wrong level. The blackened hands in Ireland was a disaster, primarily, of course, the Dardanelles crisis of 1915 to early 1916, where over 100 ,000 Allied troops were killed, wounded, or captured.

38:38I mean, this was a series of mistakes. In every single one of them, he learned from those mistakes. How did he do that? Because there's probably, I would think, maybe some method behind the madness. Maybe it's just more self-awareness or reflection, but did he have a process for learning? He wasn't hubristic. That was the key thing. I think it probably helps also, of course, that he was in a democratic system, unlike Napoleon or Hitler, whereby he was criticized the entire time in the House of Commons for all of those things. He had to defend them and therefore had to, in a logical and rational point.

39:16I mean, democracy works very well at pricking the pomposity and hubris of people if it's working properly. And Napoleon also learned from mistakes in his military career. And I don't believe that the decision to march on Moscow itself was hubristic. I'm slightly aside from a lot of military historians about this. But just to explain. He'd beaten the Russians twice before. He had an army twice the size of the Russians. He knew perfectly well that the winter was going to come. He stayed too long in Moscow, but if he'd gone to Moscow and then come back again immediately, he would not have had the climactic disasters that overcame him with the blizzards in the October and November of 1812.

40:00And so you have this sense that, yes, it was an appalling strategic error, but it wasn't done out of a drive because he thought he was a sort of demigod. That, I think, is a misunderstanding of his personality. So I'm going to ask something that Neil Ferguson of Colossus on the Shelf put in an email. I would ask Andrew about the diary he keeps, which is a source of intense anxiety. He's obsessed with this. Okay, finish the rest of that. Which is a source of intense anxiety to all of his friends and even more to his enemies. Best wishes, Neil. Neil doesn't care about any of that. He only cares about what I say about him.

40:40He is the friend. He is the friend who is obsessed with the diary. Yes, I keep a diary. For God's sake, is it such a crime? We went on the skiing holiday this year and it's all he talked about. He's obsessed. The forbidden fruit? I mean, what is the story here? I think he's kicking himself that he didn't keep on. You know, you think of all these extraordinary people he meets, you know, every time I see him, he's just been talking to President Xi or Bibi Netanyahu or, you know, President of America. And he doesn't write down and keep it all in the diary. So I think there's an element of envy going on here, frankly.

41:22But I find it very relaxing and calming to think that my life isn't just going to be a complete waste of time. And one of the only ways that I can justify this concept that it's all not just a sort of, you know, nihilistic sort of maelstrom. and boondoggle, exactly, is by writing books, obviously, which I hope will survive me, but also noting down what I've done in the day. But Neil is convinced that every time he says anything embarrassing or something, I'm going to be noting... You're just loading the ammo into your diary. Exactly. And when we're sort of 80, he's going to go to the bookshop, buy the diary, flick to Ferguson, Neil, and see sort of 40 entries, each of which is going to make his face go redder than the last.

42:22The following charges. Exactly. It's not going to be like that at all. What he's actually going to do is to immediately go to the diary and look up Ferguson Neal, but see all the amusing, charming, intelligent remarks he's made, the witticisms, you know, and all that kind of thing. And not just him, obviously, everybody that I've ever met over the last 40 plus years. And how do you keep your diary? You're on your metal now. You're going to have to, I'm going to say, went on Tim Ferriss' show. To be on Best Behavior. Exactly. What an idiot. Note to self, send chocolates to Andrew. Don't forget his birthday.

43:01Now, there are many, many people who keep a diary. How do you keep your diary? Is it a nightly exercise? Is it typed out? No, you mustn't do it nightly. Is it a quill pen? You mustn't do it nightly because, or at least you might be able to, but I drink. I like drinking too. Good, yeah. And so there's nothing worse than trying to write. If you've been drinking, also writing down the witticism, sometimes there's a bit of a problem going to the fact that I can't read my writing the next morning. But no, it has to be done pretty much the next morning. You can't leave it for two weeks or so. Do you do it?

43:36What's your frequency? Every day. I used to write it. Oh, no, but if nothing interesting has happened, then I won't put anything down. Nothing to report. Yeah, no. Or like Louis XVI on the 14th of July, 1789, the day of the fall of the Bastille. All he writes is rien. Nothing. So I hope I'm not going to be quite as moronic as that. It's not really intended for publication, which is another thing that Neil doesn't understand. He's going to latch onto that really part of that sentence. He's going to be like, you see? You see? Yeah, yeah. No, of course he is. But nonetheless, I do find it a, well, you mentioned earlier about how many words I write.

44:15It's never more than about 500 words maximum. And it picks the most interesting part of the day. And if somebody has said or done something interesting, I'll stick it in. Do you do that before your book writing? Let's say you're on. Yes. First thing in the morning. All right. And is that just like pajama, slippers and a cup of coffee or? Yeah. Precisely that. Yeah. All right. Great. Yeah, exactly. And do you take, this seems like such a ridiculous question, but how do you think about taking breaks when you're writing? I mean, obviously you might have a bathroom break or something like that. Do you build in breaks?

44:49Do you ride the flow as long as you have it? What does it look like? The flow as long as you have it. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it might not come back if you deliberately have breaks. Interrupted. Sometimes, and I'm slightly loathe to admit this in public, But nonetheless, sometimes if you are really flowing, I can go without, you know, washing for three days. I can be in my dressing gown and slippers. My wife finds it extremely unhygienic and I'm not allowed to sleep in the same bed. But I will, if I'm running, you know, hard at a really difficult chapter and I need to keep my thoughts in order, I will not waste time doing anything.

45:28I'll get some breakfast, you know, and so on. But that will just be a dash to the kitchen and back again. Because you've got to get, if something's complicated, and there are lots of occasions, another classic, we go back to the 10th of May, 1940. That, in my Churchill book, you have to get it right. Because every minute, not just every hour, every minute something is happening. They're getting news from what the Luftwaffe is attacking, and he's then having to create his government. He then goes off to the House of Commons and so on. It's just relentless. And unless you encapsulate in your mind successfully what is important about that day, you'll never get it over to the reader.

46:08And if you're constantly going off and going for a walk or going to the gym or showering or whatever, there's a danger that you're going to fall out of the rhythm of creativity. How do you think about that flow when you have the flow? I mean, And there is... I hasten to add it's never more than three days I've ever come without a shower. I wouldn't judge. I was just on a hiking trip. I went 10 days without showering. So I don't judge. I won't throw stones in my glass house. And it's only when I'm writing the book. I hasten to add that as well. God. I don't want people to come up and show parties, hold their nose and go, hello, Andrew.

46:45How do you think about that flow with writing? So there's one reason not to interrupt the writing. If you have a hard task ahead of you and you have 47 balls in the air, and if you drop them, you're going to have to start the juggling process all over again. The boot up sequence takes a long time. How do you think about the flow of writing or that feeling that things are coming to you more easily or moving onto the page more easily? Sometimes it's a very bad thing. Of course, Dr. Johnson did say, when you have written your most brilliant purple paragraph, read it again and rip it up. So, no, you must - Tell him more about that.

47:25Oh, yeah. No, well, if you think that you've just written something completely brilliant, there's a very good chance that it's rubbish. It has to be somebody else. It has to be your publisher or some other person who can read it and have a completely objective eye, because there's a very good chance that you're hugging yourself with glee about something that actually you think sounds wonderful, but in fact, it's complete. It's complete. The name of my memoir, Hugging Yourself with Glee. And I write that down, give you your customary 5%. That's fine. If you had to choose, maybe you don't want to choose from your darlings here, but if this question has an answer, you don't even need to name them, but you keep a person in mind.

48:04If you had to choose one person to act as your proofreader for your work, to be that sanity check. He's called Stuart Proffitt. He's the most brilliant publisher in London. He's known by everybody to be the most brilliant. He's also the most irritating peasant. It makes sense to me. Peasant. Oh my God. For my Napoleon book, he's going to listen to this, so I'm going to have to be as nice as possible. But oh my, he's Professor Perfect is my nickname for it, because he's a total professorial kind of figure. And for my Napoleon book, I remember a series of marginalia. And again, this is the thing where you think you've done something rather good, you know.

48:43And he writes, one of the things he wrote in the moment, are you sure this joke is funny? Nothing more crushing than to have that. He also wrote... Strucks me as a very British answer. Exactly. Question mark, you know. And you read it again, you chortle to yourself. Yes, it is funny. you know. Damn it. But he wrote, there were a whole series of them in the, well, we were talking earlier about the 1796 campaign of Napoleon. He said, how wide was the River Poe in 1796? There was another one. Did Napoleon take Herodotus to Egypt? He said, I can't, damn, I don't know. I'm going to have to find out, you know.

49:25He's a genius, but also a very irritating person. Could you say more about what makes him so good? I'll buy some time just by saying, if I can't find a writer friend of mine, let's just say, or an editor who can proofread my work, I'll very often give, and I write a particular type of thing, but I would give my chapter, let's just say, to a friend who's a really good lawyer. And part of the reason for that is that they're very good at trimming out excess. And if anything is ambiguous, they're - Or contradictory. Or contradictory. They're very good at surgically excising that. What makes this particular gentleman, what was his name again?

50:03Stuart? Stuart Prophet. All right. Great name. What makes Stuart so good at giving feedback? Does he see things differently? He's profoundly committed to history. He loves history. So he has a sort of higher purpose to try to flood the world with great history books, which is, as far as I'm concerned, the greatest higher purpose that you can have. I mean, it doesn't get better than that. He has a very logical brain. He's very good on syntax. So anything that doesn't sound right in a sentence, he will point out. Sometimes to a sound right from a poetic perspective. From a poetic perspective, yeah.

50:47if there's a rhythm that isn't right, or if something rhymes as well. Sometimes you can use two words that have a rhyme in them and he will cut that automatically because it just doesn't feel right. And sit well with his sensibilities. Precisely. And mine, I hasten to act, because I very rarely actually disagree with him. I did on the joke, by the way. And whenever anybody tells me that that particular joke is funny, You forward it to him. I forward it to him. I ping the email straight on to Stuart. Of course I do. I'd be mad not to, wouldn't I? But no, there's a, I mean, and he's been doing it for 40 years, and he's at the top of his trade.

51:26So you would expect him to be really good, but boy, is he. So there's two examples you gave, the width of the river and Herodotus. Why did he ask those two? Because he is always trying to put himself into the mind of the reader, and wondering what the reader would be thinking. And he thought, rightly or wrongly in this case, that the reader would be interested in the width of the river and whether or not Herodotus went with him. But there are loads more examples like that. I will send him 100 pages and he'll send me back 100 pages of questions and criticisms and remarks. I almost sometimes think that I ought to put his name on the front cover of the book.

52:06He phoned me up actually about the Napoleon book. and the original of Napoleon just had a huge N on it and lots of Bs. And he phoned me up and he said, I've got this idea for the front cover of the book. Your name isn't going to be on it. And he said, and neither is Napoleon's. And I thought over the phone, I thought, okay, he's finally gone completely mad. Yeah, exactly. That's right. Poor man. How long can he stay in his job if he's going to come up with ideas? Hope he can fake it for a while. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Exactly, but it can't be long now. And it turned out to be a totally brilliant concept because if you see a gigantic N with bees, you think of Napoleon.

52:48Bees as in, I'm such an idiot. Bees, like honeybees. Honeybees, yeah. That was his symbol. It was Napoleon's symbol. Because they could sting, but they could also give honey. That was the idea. And it just captured people's imagination and sold an awful lot of copies, which was really great. That's sold half a million copies, that book, now. That's incredible. Yeah. That is incredible. well, it sounds like such a gift to have a steward. I need a steward. Yeah, everyone needs a steward. Everyone needs a steward. Don't take mine, but whatever you need it. No, I don't think he might spend his entire first month on just the syntax errors in my first chapter.

53:24You do want to strangle him, by the way. This is the sign of a very good proofreader often. Why do you think it is that some historical figures take on these mythic proportions where some who have huge impacts seem to sort of fall into obscurity over time? Are there particular characteristics? Is it self-made in a sense where people create that myth of themselves while they're still alive? How do you think about that? I haven't thought about that before. That's a really good question. I think that it's a bit like there are some things that are very difficult to get over to people on the printed page.

54:05Charisma is one of them. Charm is another one. Sexiness. These are things that we all know from our own lives matter enormously. If somebody's charismatic, charming, and sexy, you're going to want to be interested in them, follow them much more than somebody who isn't. And yet explaining how they are, any of those things, very famously hard to explain. And I think the same is true with historical characters. How can it be that this unprepossessing looking American president who happens to, with his strange beard but not moustache, who happens to be president at the time that the country is falling apart, manages to save the country through this terrible, see it through this terrible civil war and then is assassinated right at the end of the civil war?

54:55I mean, the story is so extraordinary, isn't it? and yet to explain the charisma and charm, not sexiness, I don't think it out of Lincoln's case, but many of your listeners or readers might disagree with you nonetheless. Just imagining him popping up on a dating app. If you swipe right or left for Abe Lincoln. Might ride a fixed gear bike, make expensive cappuccinos. That's kind of the hipster look. Anyway, I digress. It is difficult to explain how some people just grab the headlines and others don't. I mean, of course, it does help to be a leader in a war. That's true of Lincoln and Churchill and Bonin and so on.

55:36The chance of coming a world historical figure if you are prime minister of Luxembourg in a time of peace is going to be much more difficult, of course. But yeah, there doesn't seem to be a hard and fast rule, does that? Hard and fast recipe. and I can follow. I'm just kidding. Well, don't take us to war on the back of you wanting to be remembered. I don't think I would capable. Certainly not eager. Makes me think of, what is the title of that poem? Ozymandias, look upon my works in despair. I'll leave that alone. I met a traveler from an antique land who said, two vast and chunkless legs of stone stand in the desert, and near them on the sand, half-shrunk, a shattered visage lies, whose wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tells that its sculpture well those passions read, but yet survive.

56:29My name is Ozymandias. King of kings, look upon my works, ye mighty, in despair. Nothing besides remains round that eternal wreck. Long and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. Hot damn. There you go, listeners. Can you point out to the listeners that you didn't tell me that this was going to happen? I did not. I did not send a memo in advance. And I suppose the preface to that is that there are these ruins sticking out of the sands. The feet. The feet. Well, the trunks. That's right. The trunks of the legs. So there was obviously a huge, magnificent kind of, you know, pyramid-high, glorious statue to Ozymandias.

57:10And now there's nothing. And it goes back to what I was saying earlier about not being remembered. Did you remember the... Now I'm going to, I feel like I'm not cross-examining, but asking too much. But who is the author of that poem? Piersy Bichelli. I saw the one of, maybe the original or certainly a first draft in Oxford, because I was going through a program at Wadham College, and there's an exhibit on right now, which is something like cut, paste, rewrite. And it shows the hand-edited works of Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and all these others. and I came across that. If anybody wants to see a first edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, it's just gone on exhibition at the, I was there this morning, the Lambeth Palace Library.

57:58There's a thing called Her Book. It's about female, early female writers. It's a brilliant exhibition. And so if there's anyone in London who's interested in seeing that book, it's there today. Beautiful. And if you're near Oxford, Weston Library has the exhibit that I was mentioning a lot of gems a lot of gems you have some really fun old stuff in the uk that turns out thank you i'm not going to take that personally no no no that's a compliment yeah old in the u.s is like 1970 you know it's smaller i thought you're talking about me oh no good all right Not you. How do you think about legacy? Because I, along the lines of Anya, the Ozymandias piece, I'm like, is it just sort of hubris to believe in the first place that that's something worth aspiring to, having something last and stand the test of time?

58:53I mean, how do you, how do you personally think about this? Well, especially as someone who studies history. Yes. I obviously do want people to read my books long after I've died. Now, I'm not going to know whether they are or not. So why on earth? It just seems so illogical to even think that, doesn't it? That it should matter to me that anything happens the second after I've died. But I know that I do. And it is one of the drives for being a writer because words always live forever. And they're virtually the only thing that does. Ozymandias' statue is just two trunkless legs of stone. Whereas actually his words, you know, look upon my works, ye mighty in despair, that goes to the heart of the human condition.

59:40And Shelley's poetry still survives in a way that Ozymandias' statue doesn't. So there is something about words that are immortal, and we're all sort of grasping for immortality in one way or another, aren't we? Yeah, yeah, it is true. Do you read fiction? Yes, yes, I do. When I go on holiday, which is usually hiking, actually, with my wife, she loves going to places that involve mountains. And in order to get history completely out of my system for the two weeks or so that we're hiking, I do read fiction. Sometimes if I want to completely clear my brain, I'll have a detective novel. and I've chosen the most complicated of all of the detective novelists, a chap called Robert Goddard.

1:00:27Have you ever heard of Robert Goddard? I have not. So complicated to work out who done it or what groups of people done it. You know, it's very rarely just one person and why. And I try and make notes in the back of the book, connecting each person to everybody else. And so by the end of it, it looks like one of those really complicated sort of management. Oh, it's like an org chart. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Hundreds of people connecting to everybody else to try and work out who done it. And he always, always beats me. Yeah, that sounds fun. I've been getting into that. But as far as sort of high culture writing novels are concerned, I will occasionally do that.

1:01:09I'm president of the Cliverton Literary Festival. And so we have lots of novelists come to that. And so if you've got William Boyd or Salman Rushdie or somebody who you know you're going to be bumping into at the festival, it's always a good idea to read their latest novel. We had Robert Harris recently, and so that's always well worth doing. And then there are a few writers like Michel Welbeck, who is just so great that you have to sort of read whatever he brings out. Is there, I don't recognise the name, I'm embarrassed to say. He's a French writer. It's pronounced Hellebec, and he's a genius, He's very controversial and quite unpopular in France.

1:01:50And the latest one I'm reading features his own murder.

1:01:58It's a great satire. It's very, very funny. Is there a book you might suggest starting with? Or are we going to start with one? The Map and the Territory. The Map of the Territory? The Map and the Territory of Michel Hellebecq. The name starts H-E-L-L-E-B. Oh, I'll find it. And yeah, it's a sort of satire on French intellectual customs and... I can see them loving that. It's very funny. It's very funny. Why is he controversial? Oh, because he's deeply politically incorrect as well. He just doesn't care. He just doesn't care what he writes. He's a honey badger in that sense. Do you know what I mean?

1:02:35I do. I do. I do. He's a literary honey badger as well, Bec. Very honey badger. All right. So speaking of politically incorrect, how should we, in your mind, write about imperial history? We should try as far as possible to be genuinely objective. We shouldn't take the assumption that all white people, whenever they went abroad, did so solely in order to rape, murder, massacre, and exploit. Because certainly in the latter part, we were talking earlier actually about Winston Churchill and the noblesse oblige, the concept that it was part of your duty as a privileged person to try to make the world a better place for other less privileged people.

1:03:23And that was, especially in the last part of the British Empire, a driving force for a lot of people, especially obviously missionaries and Christians, but also other people, explorers and people who were involved in agriculture and so on. They actually were not driven by rapacity and greed in the way that essentially the Marxist analysis of imperialism has made out. So be objective. Some of those people were like that. Undoubtedly, of course they were, especially some of the people in Southern Africa and elsewhere. But for a long period of the story of the British Empire, for much of that empire, it actually was a force for human good rather than evil.

1:04:08What do you see as the challenges moving forward for the capturing of history, and or how do you see it changing as we move forward? I am quite worried about it in Britain, because first of all, fewer and fewer people seem to be taking it as a subject at a university level. Secondly, we have this thing, it's nicknamed Henry to Hitler, where we jump from the Tudors to the Second World War, and we don't do the very important intervening stages of the Stuarts, the Civil War, the Hanoverians, the loss of America, really anything up to the outbreak of the First World War. And there's so much of really important history in that period that we seem to jump from one to the next.

1:04:58There was a survey quite recently of British teenagers, quite a big survey, you know, over a thousand of them. And 20 % of them thought, it was like 23 % of them, thought that the American War of Independence was won by Denzel Washington. You know, and the Americans get a bad rap. Yeah, I know, I know, exactly. It's not just us. And also there were 20 % of these kids, These are British school kids. Who also thought that Winston Churchill was a fictional character and that Sherlock Holmes and Eleanor Rigby were real people. So whatever's going on in British history teaching, I think there's still a lot to be desired.

1:05:40If you had never been able to write any books in that alternate reality, what have you personally or what would you have gained personally from studying history? It's a lot of things, isn't it, history? It can be a bit of a quicksand. In what sense? Well, as soon as you think you understand a period, all it takes is one new set of papers or a new book written by somebody else, friends especially, that can make you look again at the same period and completely change your mind about it. And that's a little unnerving at the age of 61, I have to say. I'm just reading Ronald Hutton's second volume of his life of Oliver Cromwell, which has just been published.

1:06:25And I'd always thought of Cromwell as somebody who had a set of principles that he moulded his times around in order to see through. and Ronald Huffman has completely exploded that thesis for me. And I realised that he was, like most politicians, just sort of grabbing the coattails of history and hanging on as much as he could. And yes, he was a good soldier and so on, but he was, in terms of his politics, he was constantly trying to create alliances, of course, like all politicians do. And when opportunities came, he grabbed them. But he was at the mercy of events much more than creating them, whereas I had for years had the sort of image of Oliver Cromwell, like that statue outside Parliament of this incredibly solid figure.

1:07:16He wasn't like that at all. What are other things that attract you or attracted you to history? It wasn't just Christopher Perry. My dad read history at Oxford and he used to take me around castles. We go on holiday to Wales and see the great Edward the first castles. And he would chat to, on journeys, we'd chat about history and what ifs, you know, counterfactuals and things like that. And so I grew up feeling very comfortable with it and recognising that it's a beautiful and fascinating thing, you know. Whereas I think sometimes some people can be not scared of history, but they can be put off history because they weren't taught it very well at school, or they just thought it was a succession of dates, or they can't see any relevance to their daily lives, and so on.

1:08:07And I've never been one of those people. So if you were doing a presentation, it could be anywhere, on why people, aside from conflating Denzel Washington with other historical figures, why they should read history or engage with history. What would the thrust of the presentation be? I suppose it does come back to that Aldous Huxley quote, you know, about trying to learn some of the lessons. There's a marvellous moment when in 1953, June 1953, at the time of the late Queen's coronation, Winston Churchill is walking across Westminster Hall, this fabulous great hall that was, when it was built in the late 13th century, the largest room in Europe.

1:08:54And it's fused with history. It's where, of course, where Churchill himself was to lie in state, but also where the monarchs lie in state, where Warren Hastings went on trial and Charles I went on trial and people like Mandela and Zelensky have given speeches and things like that. It's compounded. Thomas More went on trial there, the Earl of Stratford. I just mentioned a whole load of people who were all decapitated, actually. William Wallace as well. He was decapitated as well. And so you've got this sense of all of British history, you know, summed up in a room essentially. And a young American student stops Churchill and asks essentially for a piece of life advice.

1:09:34And Churchill replies, study history, study history, for therein lies all the secrets of statecraft. And that would be one of the reasons that I would tell people, you know, that if you want to understand what's going on in the world, you do have to look and see what has happened before. And there's no person who doesn't want to have a better understanding of what's going on in the world or try to work out for themselves the great forces in our planet today. So that, I suppose, would be the answer. That's why I've chosen study history as my motto of my coat of arms, for example, and why I've got a podcast too, and I call it Secrets of Statecraft.

1:10:12I think that's a sort of motivating factor. So secrets of statecraft. That is it's the Hoover institutions podcast, but it's great fun to do. Must have Neil Ferguson on at some stage. And I can tease him about not hearing a diary. What is statecraft? I think I know, but I want it very often. I think I know something and it is in fact not true at all. So it's the ability to run a country. So you've got to juggle the diplomatic, the military, the economic, the cultural, all of these things, the religious, all of these things together to create the kind of country that you want it to be. And that is Statecraft.

1:10:54And so it's been going on as long as human history has and always will. Looking forward, let's see, you've studied many great figures from history. You've looked at these different chapters of humanity. Including your late king, your last king, George III. I wrote a biography of him a few years ago, which was great fun to do. Sorry, carry on. Oh, no, that's all right. I was just going to ask you, looking forward, given how much you've reflected backwards, where do you think things are going for the UK and or for the US? If you were a betting man and you say, hmm, there's a good chance. It's not a certainty.

1:11:32But if the dominoes continue to fall the way they're falling, A, B, or C. I'm afraid I'm a bit of a pessimist. Yeah. Not so much for the United States, because you're still such a rich and innovative country. But I'm wondering in Britain, whether or not, and history plays an important part of this, especially the way in which history is used politically, to wonder whether or not we still believe in ourselves. certainly in the way that we did when I was growing up. In 20, I'm going to try and get the statistics right. I think it's 2015. As recent as 2015, maybe it's 2010, 86 % of people were proud of British history.

1:12:19That has now fallen down to 56%. And I'm sure that the reason for this is the sustained attack on, well, the British empire that we were discussing earlier, and people forgetting the part that we played in the abolition of slavery and concentrating just on the horrors and the monstrous things that happened. And we therefore, if you're not proud of your past, you're not proud of your ancestors, you're not proud of the things that they produced, and Britain has produced some pretty extraordinary and wonderful things for the world, then it's difficult to see why anyone would want to be proud of the future of the country as well.

1:13:02And so I'm pretty pessimistic. And when I feel pessimism for America, it's for things like taking Thomas Jefferson's statue down from the New York City Hall. It's a form of cultural suicide. It strikes me not to admire the founders of your nation. And yes, of course, he owned slaves. But he also wrote a constitution that has survived for a quarter of a millennium. And he was brave enough, Washington and all the others, brave enough to stand up against the most powerful empire in the world. These things, you deserve your statue, it seems to me. And if you go around pulling these things down, I think you're breaking a kind of living link with the past that makes you a great country.

1:13:51And that's certainly happening in this country as well. I mean, I'm a bit of a pessimist anyway, because I'm a Tory. And pessimism is an essential part of Toryism. But not as big a pessimist I hasten to add as Neil Ferguson, who I like to say, it's never terribly difficult to tell the, it's a quote from P.G. Woodhouse, never terribly difficult to tell the difference between a ray of sunshine and a Scotsman with a grievance. and neil always tells you that it's all doom and gloom and everything's going to be utterly disastrous i wonder whether or not he truly believes it because he's actually himself a very you know upbeat and personally uh sort of positive individual who does lots of things that imply that actually he does think the world's going to get better but boy oh boy how do you personally if you do i mean it seems like you examine or you have a fascination with counterfactuals, the what-ifs.

1:14:46You read books that have the potential for upending long-held theses, which can be uncomfortable, I would imagine. Do you have people around you or who you deliberately expose yourself to who offset perhaps some of your pessimistic tendencies with forms of optimism that they can defend? And yes, my wife is the classic example. She's optimistic about the future. She's in business. She's a very successful businesswoman. So she actually sees a lot of the innovations that are taking place, the drugs that are coming online that are saving lives and taking on defeating pain and so on. She's great at believing in the innate capacity of capitalism to reinvent itself in a positive way for more and more people than take people out of poverty and all of those positive things.

1:15:39It's an invigorating thing to talk about the world with her because it makes me much less sort of Eeyore-like and Ferguson-esque. I feel like any other inside scoop that people should know about Neil? What is his secret optimistic voice memos that he sends you? You can annotate, add to your diary. please see audio reference 47. Well, Andrew, this has been great fun. You have many books that people can read, certainly, and they'll all be in the show notes. But the, is it most recent conflict? Yes, that's a book I wrote with David Petraeus. And of course, him being a general who's commanded armies of over 160 ,000 in both Iraq and Afghanistan has been so fascinating intellectually for me, because of course I'm a military historian.

1:16:37I've never worn a uniform for one minute. So that was great. And the subtitle for folks, just so they have that, the evolution of warfare from 1945 to Ukraine. Well, it's now actually Gaza. The paperback takes us up to Gaza as well, about halfway through that campaign in Gaza. It was after the Russian invasion of Ukraine that I came up with the idea of writing the book. And I got on to David, who I knew, and said, why don't we write this as a military history? There are going to be lots of political histories about this, but just the military side of it, and put it into the context of all the wars that have happened since 1945.

1:17:17So we go through not all of them, there are 400 of them, but all the key ones, you know, the 40 or so key ones that you'll have heard of and that show how war has evolved and developed. And sometimes it leaps forward, and other times it goes into sort of sideshows. But we went to the publishers and they quite unstandardly said, well, how are you going to divvy up the chapters? And I said, well, David's going to write about all the countries he's invaded and I'll fill in the rest. And he also did the Vietnam chapter as well, actually. And then we sent hundreds, maybe thousands of emails to one another over the course of the year or so that we were writing it.

1:17:57That's very fast. It is fast. It is fast. How did you do it so quickly? Well, because the situation in Ukraine was moving so quickly. And then the Gaza war broke out on the day of the publication of the hardback. So that was literally the 7th of October that we were bringing that out. So we then needed to get on with writing about that as well. And as you know, I tend to write quickly. And so does he. You know, he's a soldier scholar. He went to your old university. He was at Princeton doing a postgrad on military history. So he was very much able to keep sending back those emails. Yeah, I suppose he's not lacking discipline, would be my guess.

1:18:38What did you find were key ingredients to that successful collaboration? What made it work, especially with that type of pressure under deadline? Well, I think there was, I know there was mutual respect, which is very important. I'd never written a book with anybody before. And I was - I'm in the midst of doing that right now, which is part of the reason I'm asking. Yeah, no, well, it's like nerve wracking, isn't it? Because one can get very sort of proprietorial about one's work. But that wasn't the case with David because the insights that he gave about what it was like to be a commander into wars at the absolute apex of command meant that he could then look back on wars like the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, to sort of place himself in the position of Matthew Ridgway in Korea, for example.

1:19:29And that was so fascinating that I knew that there was nothing that I could add to that. I just knew that the combination of the soldier and the historian would produce something that was really intellectually stimulating for me. And that's, you know, in the end, life is a constant battle against boredom, isn't it? It's a constant rearguard action against not being stimulated. Do you think you will do more collaborations? How are you thinking about your writing moving forward? No, my next two books are just going to be written by me. I've got Napoleon and his marshals about how the emperor interacted with his marshals and how the marshals interacted with each other.

1:20:15They fortunately all hated each other, so that's much easier for a historian to write something interesting. and hated each other in very imaginative ways. The greatest reality TV show I've ever seen. Yes, exactly. And then after that, I'm doing Disraeli. And he's an extraordinary character who was a complete outsider, was a Jew, of course, didn't go to one of the British public schools or Oxford and Cambridge or any university. And through his own brilliance, and he was a novelist, of course, also, his own wit, he wound up becoming the most powerful man in the world. Yeah, I look forward to reading that one.

1:20:53Good. Thank you. Let me be back on the show in 2030, which is when it's being public. I hope I'll still be around. We'll see. I've been here for a decade. We'll see how it goes. Andrew, this has been great. I really appreciate you taking the time. People can find you. Correct me if I get any of this wrong. Andrew-roberts.net. Would that be the main website? That's what I have here. Can't remember, but yes, I hope so. Let's just say that's right. And if it's not, I will put the correct version in the show notes. Ian, then is Twitter, or X as it stands now, a good place for people to follow you as well?

1:21:26Yeah, that has things like my podcast and so on. Perfect. So that's, as I have it here, A. Roberts underscore Andrew. Is it good?

1:21:38Perfect. We'll fact check off that. But we do have that. Is there anything else that you would like to add? any requests of my audience, anything at all that you'd like to mention? Absolutely not. Just thank you so much, Tim, for being on the show. I've really enjoyed it. Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time. This has really been great. And for people who are listening, as always, you can find the show notes at tim.blog slash podcast. We will include links to everything we discussed. And also, as always, until next time, just be a little kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself.

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