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

0:00:04 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of
0:00:10 the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers or deconstruct
0:00:15 those who deconstruct world-class performers. In the case of today’s guest, who is Andrew Roberts.
0:00:21 Andrew Roberts has written 20 books, which have been translated into 28 languages and have won
0:00:27 13 literary prizes. These include Masters and Commanders, The Storm of War, a new history
0:00:33 of the Second World War, Napoleon, A Life, Churchill, Walking with Destiny, George III,
0:00:39 The Life and Rain of Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch, and most recently Conflict, The Evolution
0:00:46 of Warfare from 1945 to Gaza, which he co-authored with General David Petraeus. Lord Roberts is a
0:00:51 Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society, the Bonnie and Tom
0:00:56 McCloskey Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and a visiting professor
0:01:02 at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He is also a member of the House
0:01:09 of Lords. You can find all things Andrew at andrew-roberts.net online, and he is also on X,
0:01:16 the artist formerly known as Twitter, at x.com/aroberts_andrew. And we’re going to get to the interview,
0:01:21 but quickly, before that, just a few words about our sponsors who make this show possible.
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0:05:52 “At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.”
0:05:56 “Can I answer your personal question?” “No, I would have seen it in a bloodbath time.”
0:06:02 “I’m a cyber-nerdic organism living this year over a method of endoskeleton.”
0:06:12 Pleasure to meet you. Thank you for taking the time.
0:06:15 Thanks so much, Tim, for having me on this show.
0:06:19 I thought we would start with Cranley after your A-levels.
0:06:20 Did you now?
0:06:23 What happened? What on earth happened?
0:06:27 That’s the way we’re going to make friends and get on with each other.
0:06:29 Roll up the sleeves and just get into it.
0:06:32 You’re going to mention the reason that I was expelled from school. Or at least,
0:06:34 I’m going to mention the reason because you don’t know.
0:06:35 I don’t know the reason.
0:06:41 Absolutely good. Okay. I don’t think I’m the first person ever as a young man to get drunk
0:06:44 and climb up buildings. Absolutely not.
0:06:45 Thank you. Time-honored tradition, I know.
0:06:48 Hallelujah that I’m not the only person this happened to.
0:06:55 But quite understandably, the school chucked me out before I fell off one of them and they’d
0:06:59 got blamed. It led to actually one of my wife’s most brilliant witticism.
0:07:04 She’s a very funny woman with my wife and she said, “Yes, and all Andrew’s done since in life
0:07:11 is to get drunk and social climb.” That is clever.
0:07:12 It’s not bad, is it?
0:07:14 All right. We might come back to that.
0:07:18 It seems like also, maybe it’s hard for me to tell given the British school system,
0:07:22 although I did go to St. Paul’s in New Hampshire where they do have the third,
0:07:25 fourth, fifth, sixth form and so on. So that much, I know.
0:07:29 But I think in the same piece where I found the crannily bit in doing the research,
0:07:36 also found note that you’re approached as a possible candidate for MI6 a bit later on.
0:07:38 No, that was when I was at Cambridge.
0:07:38 Cambridge.
0:07:43 Yes, absolutely. That’s the right time to be approached for MI6 is because Cambridge and MI6
0:07:50 have had a long and fairly disastrous career, needless to say. All of the worst spies in the
0:07:57 1930s, traitors of the 1930s, went to Cambridge. But yeah, it was a fascinating thing. I was
0:08:02 just going down from university and somebody in my college, one of the dons there who’s still there
0:08:07 actually, I don’t think of it, approached me and said, “How about it? Would you be interested in
0:08:13 becoming a spy?” And so automatically, needless to say, you just think of yourself as James Bond
0:08:17 immediately. That sort of dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun.
0:08:18 The soundtrack kicks off.
0:08:21 And the soundtrack in the back of your brain, you’re automatically there with your barretto
0:08:27 and the beautiful women and all of that kind of thing. But I then had to actually do the process
0:08:33 of where you need to join, which I did get through. And it was completely hilarious. I mean, it was,
0:08:38 you couldn’t satirise it, basically. They asked you things like there were hundreds of questions
0:08:42 and you had to answer them very, very quickly. And some of them were things you’d expect like,
0:08:47 you know, what are the five longest rivers in the world kind of thing? Put them in order and all
0:08:54 that. There were also things like place in order of social precedent, Prince Duke, Viscount,
0:08:56 Marquis, Baronet.
0:08:57 Oh, I’m out.
0:08:58 Well, exactly.
0:09:00 I would have thrown in Cookie Monster.
0:09:00 I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.
0:09:05 You’re American. You’re allowed to. They’re not going to ask that in the CIA. But for some reason,
0:09:11 in MI6 back, this was, I hasten to add, back in the sort of mid-1980s. That was one of the questions.
0:09:17 What did the Don think made you a potential candidate?
0:09:23 Well, that also was a little bit annoying, really, because he told me later about how he had been
0:09:30 interviewed by MI6. And one of the things that he’d been asked is, “Is Andrew a kind person?”
0:09:35 And this person said, “No, not really.” And he saw the person interviewing him
0:09:38 put a tick in the margin next to the question.
0:09:41 Wonder if that made you more or less desirable?
0:09:43 Much more desirable, as far as they were concerned.
0:09:51 I can answer that. Well, James Bond, you’re not a kind person, is he, really?
0:09:56 No, no, no. We view them as disposable pleasures. Well, perhaps.
0:10:02 So let’s see if we can take off the initial layers of the onion with respect to history.
0:10:05 Christopher Perry. Mr. Christopher Perry. Who’s that?
0:10:09 He was my first history teacher when I was at prep school.
0:10:13 Which in the English version means when you’re sort of 10 to 13.
0:10:19 He’s dead now, but he was a inspirational history master. He taught history in the way that I
0:10:25 think it should be taught in a narrative way of explaining really, you know, what happened next
0:10:30 and why. He believed in the great events, the great sort of wars and battles and things like that.
0:10:36 And he was a kind man. He wouldn’t have made it into MI6.
0:10:41 That he was a sort of old school history master of the best possible kind.
0:10:48 What characterized that? You said narrative, but maybe would you be able to contrast the status
0:10:53 quo as it goes in terms of teaching history and then how his style most differed from that?
0:10:58 He taught it as the most exciting story you’re ever going to hear,
0:11:03 basically, which has the extraordinary added advantage of being completely true.
0:11:10 He sort of sit cross-legged on the table and give you the voice of Charles I and then the voice of
0:11:15 Oliver Cromwell, you know, Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. He would entrance you
0:11:21 with the excitement of the unfolding story. Every word of which would be true.
0:11:26 It would have loads of dates in it. At the end of the term, each of the terms, the semester,
0:11:33 you’d be tested on 300 dates and not a child in that class didn’t get at least 298 of them right.
0:11:37 Extraordinary way of teaching. He did it entirely through inspiration,
0:11:41 rather than through just sort of standing there on the blackboard, ordering people to
0:11:47 remember what happened in 1356 or 1415. Did he have any theatre background?
0:11:49 You’d have thought. You would have thought.
0:11:53 Just sitting cross-legged on the desk is going to get a requisite
0:11:56 minimal amount of attention from the students, which is brilliant.
0:12:02 Automatically, of course, exactly. No, I mean, now I come to think of it, of course,
0:12:08 he was overacting from day one, but he didn’t seem to be at the time, at least as far as the
0:12:14 10-year-old Andrew Roberts was concerned. We have a sort of rental library behind us
0:12:18 in this room that I’ve rented. And one of the books sitting over there, The Power Broker,
0:12:23 does an amazing job of end-of-chapter cliffhangers. That’s, I think, Robert Carrow over there.
0:12:28 And he managed to make Urban Development, essentially that book’s about Urban Development,
0:12:32 isn’t it? And he managed to make that interesting. But you’ve got a few other ones. You’ve got a
0:12:38 great friend of mine there, Neil Ferguson, writing about his book Colossus. You’ve got
0:12:44 some pretty interesting people, a few people that I’ve met. And yeah, so you might have rented it,
0:12:50 but it’s a pretty good bunch of books. It worked out. And it’s also quite surreal that
0:12:55 Neil has featured here since he is, I’d say, partially responsible for his meeting in the
0:12:58 first place. Yeah, he told me definitely to go on your show. He said, “Lays of people, watch it,
0:13:02 and you’ve got a good sense of humor.” We’ll see. We’ll see about the sense of humor.
0:13:04 We’ll see later. Yeah, the jury is out. The jury is out.
0:13:11 I found in writing history, and I’m paraphrasing here, but I believe you’ve said before that
0:13:20 you’re cautious around the words, perhaps maybe possibly, especially probably, could you explain
0:13:24 why? Don’t use them. Don’t use them. They’re cheat words. What they’re saying to the reader is,
0:13:29 “I haven’t worked hard enough on this. I don’t know. I’m going to just come up with some kind of
0:13:34 theory here. Bear with me.” You shouldn’t do that. If the person’s paid $40 for your book,
0:13:37 he or she is going to want to think you know what you’re talking about.
0:13:46 So if something is a great story, and you’re not sure it’s true, but nonetheless, it’s funny,
0:13:50 or it shines a light onto personality, or for some reason, there’s a great reason
0:13:56 why you need to put it in the book. There are loads of ways that you can hint to the reader.
0:14:02 You can say, “It is said that,” or, “The story is told that,” or, “Anecdotally,
0:14:08 people stated that,” and that’s the signal to the reader. This is probably not true at all.
0:14:11 Someone’s hedging the bet. Yeah, but it’s too good to leave out.
0:14:17 But perhaps probably a maybe and so on. There you really are hedging your bets.
0:14:20 And I think it breaks the bond of trust that you need to have with your reader.
0:14:28 Would you mind speaking to the importance of steady nerves or self-control in crisis? It seems
0:14:36 that that’s something that recurs. And the reason I’m asking about it is, this would be, I suppose,
0:14:41 a sub-question. How much of it do you think is nature versus nurture also? But feel free to take
0:14:48 that in any direction you like. Both Napoleon and Churchill were educated in war.
0:14:54 You know, they both went to military colleges. So as their level of command grew, as they grew
0:14:59 older, the sense of responsibilities they had, the number of men, essentially, that they were
0:15:06 controlling increased exponentially. So they had the intellectual background.
0:15:13 They had the training as well. And as young men in both cases, they thought a lot about war,
0:15:20 about Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great and so on. They had a egotism to look at it in the
0:15:26 negative way, but a self-confidence to look at it in a positive way that gave them the ability to
0:15:33 take these shatteringly important decisions. So I think it’s much more nurture than the nature.
0:15:39 And, you know, in both cases, as far as they were concerned, there was a sort of holy fire
0:15:43 that they both had. There was a, not only in a religious sense, obviously, because neither of
0:15:49 them were at all religious, but in a sort of deeper spiritual sense, a belief that what they were
0:15:57 doing was so good and right and proper and had to be done that they were not kept up awake at night
0:16:04 over even the death of friends. Death of friends that they were responsible for.
0:16:08 They were responsible for. In the cases of Churchill and Napoleon, we could bring up other
0:16:11 names, or I suppose when you’re doing the Royal Weir, you could bring up other names.
0:16:18 Were there particular philosophers or writers that they found particularly instructive,
0:16:23 who they leaned on in some sense, that they found solace in, were there particular minds?
0:16:28 Well, certainly Churchill did because he was a huge reader. He was a massive
0:16:33 autodidact. He never went to university. And so, therefore, when he was a young
0:16:40 Subbleton in India in his early twenties, he sat down and read the great philosophers as well as
0:16:49 writers. And he was particularly influenced by Gibbon and Macaulay, the two great 19th century
0:16:55 historians, English historians, and that affected his writing style and, of course, later his
0:17:01 oratorical style, but also his outlook on life, philosophical outlook on life.
0:17:06 With regard to Napoleon, he was even more literary, really, because he also wrote short stories and
0:17:15 books and so on. And so, he was very much affected by what he read again as a young man.
0:17:22 And in both cases, it’s slightly, they were reading so much that it’s slightly cut them off
0:17:30 from their contemporaries. And Napoleon didn’t have many friends when he was in his early twenties.
0:17:37 And Churchill, when the other people were off sleeping in the midday heat of India,
0:17:43 his colleagues and comrades, he’d be sitting there reading Chopin and Gibbon and Macaulay and so on.
0:17:47 How did Gibbon and Macaulay inform his philosophical leanings?
0:17:54 They made him into what was called, at the time, a wig. We don’t have them today,
0:18:00 obviously, but they were, in modern sense, I suppose, liberal conservatives who believed in
0:18:03 noblesse oblige in the importance. What is that? I’m sorry.
0:18:10 Noblesse oblige. It’s almost a medieval concept where your duty, if you have privilege,
0:18:17 is to work for the great good of the community to protect widows and orphans. It’s sort of like
0:18:24 the nightly chivalric concept that you get from the Middle Ages. And they very much believed in
0:18:29 that. And so did Churchill. Let me ask about Napoleon. So I know shockingly little about
0:18:33 Napoleon. I’m embarrassed to admit, and I do want to ask more about Churchill as well. But
0:18:38 you’ve described him as the prime exemplar of war leadership. Why do you say that?
0:18:45 There are lots of military leaders who can do a lot of things, but he was the only one that I
0:18:50 can think of who could do all of them. Of course, it helps if you’re winning. In the last three years
0:18:58 of his military career, he was losing. But even then, even when he had far fewer troops, when he
0:19:04 was retreating, when he was defending Paris in the 1814 campaign, for example, he was still able
0:19:10 to win five victories in seven days. In the 1814 campaign, that’s two years after the retreat from
0:19:17 Moscow. It’s quite extraordinary capacity. And he was able to win whether he was advancing or
0:19:22 retreating, whether he was defending a town or attacking it, whether he was attacking on the
0:19:28 right or left flank or sometimes straight through the center, as at Austerlitz. He had that capacity,
0:19:35 that mind for military conquest, but also, of course, the greatness that was required
0:19:41 completely to revolutionize French society. People think that the French Revolution revolutionized
0:19:47 society. The clues in the name, as it were. But in fact, the long lasting things that actually
0:19:55 dragged France into the 19th century were things like the Code Napoleon, which were not a revolutionary
0:20:01 concept. They were a Napoleonic concept. This may seem like a lazy question, but since I’m
0:20:07 operating from a deficit here with respect to knowledge of Napoleon, what do you think it was
0:20:13 that allowed him to be a decathlete of war, as it were, being good at all of these different facets?
0:20:19 And I think of how we might analyze different athletes and what allows them to exercise the
0:20:24 capabilities we see, sort of breaking it down into its component parts. But how would you describe
0:20:27 what enabled him to do that where others were unable?
0:20:34 It was inspiration, but also perspiration. He really did put in the time, thinking about it
0:20:41 and reading about it by it, I mean warfare. And of course, he’d been educated in it.
0:20:49 He read the key books. There’s a guy called the Comte de Giver, who in 1772 wrote a book about
0:20:58 strategy and tactics. And he, 30 years later, put these into operation. And so he was able to spot
0:21:04 the sort of best of the best when it came to a modern thinking and to, or in this case, 30 year
0:21:09 old thinking, in fact, that didn’t matter because the weapons of war hadn’t changed in the intervening
0:21:18 period. And he was able to put those thoughts and ideas into practical use, the classic example
0:21:21 being the core system. And when he- What was it called?
0:21:32 It’s called the core system. It’s basically CORPS. And what he did with them was to create
0:21:38 mini armies, essentially, which were able to march separately, but converge and concentrate
0:21:44 for the battle. And so one of your core would engage the enemy, and then he would use the other
0:21:50 cores to outmaneuver and envelop the enemy, sometimes double envelop the enemy. It was a
0:21:56 brilliant concept. And actually, the allies didn’t start beating Napoleon until they had also adopted
0:22:03 the core system. He was always at the cutting edge of thinking of the new concepts. And at the same
0:22:12 time, he had very old fashioned views about how to excite the men. And he, I mean, victory, obviously,
0:22:18 is the best thing when it comes to excite the men. Exactly. Nothing much works better than that.
0:22:23 But as I say, he was still winning at the end of his career. But he had this belief that
0:22:31 to appeal to the soul was the way to electrify the men. And so he was able to do that. And some
0:22:35 people who he was against, Duke of Wellington, the British general, being the classic example,
0:22:40 who won the Battle of Waterloo against him, it wasn’t interesting electrifying the soul of the
0:22:46 men at all. He despised his ordinary soldiers. But nonetheless, you’re talking about Wellington?
0:22:53 Duke of Wellington, he had some sort of choice negative remarks about his own soldiers. And he
0:23:00 was a rather sort of stuffy aristocrat. But they loved him because he cared about how many of them
0:23:06 died in battle. And he never lost the battle as well, which is a very useful thing in a commander
0:23:12 needless to say. But he didn’t try. He didn’t go out. He would think it beneath him to go out and
0:23:19 try to inspire the men. Whereas Napoleon, his choice of hats and his great coats and his way
0:23:25 of taking off medals, his own medals and giving them to soldiers on the battlefield and his orders
0:23:32 of the day, his proclamations before the Battle of the Pyramids in 1799, he said, 40 centuries look
0:23:36 down upon you. And this is an extraordinary thing for a soldier, you know, in Egypt far away from
0:23:43 home. He looks up at the pyramids and thinks, yeah, he’s placing the events of that day in the long
0:23:49 historical parabola. And Churchill did that too, by the way, of course, to a great degree. In about
0:23:56 10% of all of the speeches that Churchill gave in 1940, there’s some reference to history all the
0:24:03 past. He too would summon up the idea that yes, Britain is on its own, Britain and the British
0:24:07 Commonwealth are on their own. And this of course was in the period before America and Russia were
0:24:13 in the war. But we’ve been in terrible straits before. Look at Sir Francis Drake, look at Admiral
0:24:19 Nelson, and so on. And we came through those and won. He also brought up the First World War a lot.
0:24:26 So yes, he too drew on history. And people knew that because he’d written history books and written
0:24:31 biographies, including the biography of his great ancestor, the First Duke of Marlborough,
0:24:36 he was with Wellington, the best soldier that Britain ever produced. People trusted his view
0:24:42 of history. So instead of biographies, I’d like to ask about autobiography. It’s my impression
0:24:48 that you recommend that young people read my early life. And that there are life lessons contained
0:24:55 within it that perhaps might help young people. What types of good advice or life lessons
0:25:00 can people expect to find in that book? Or does anything stand out to you?
0:25:06 Oh, yes. Well, loads of them. I mean, resilience is the classic one. Although he doesn’t go in
0:25:13 this book into criticising his parents, even between the lines, Churchill was tremendously
0:25:19 resilient because his father despised him and his mother ignored him, essentially. But in the actual
0:25:25 book itself, he talks about how wonderful it is to be young, 20 to 25, those are the years,
0:25:30 he says people will forgive you for mistakes you make in that period. It’s not until you’re 30
0:25:35 that people judge you on what you’ve achieved rather than your promise and so on. So it’s a,
0:25:40 he writes about his time, his escape from prison, for example, which, let’s face it,
0:25:46 there is no young man or woman who hasn’t at some stage dreamt about the idea of a successful
0:25:51 prison escape. He took part in the last Great Cavalry Charge of the British Empire. And so he
0:25:58 writes about what it’s like to charge in with Lancers in, he himself had a pistol in a Great
0:26:04 Cavalry Charge. You know, these are, it’s just the most exciting book. And it draws you along
0:26:11 with life lessons that are very good, I think, even for today at a time when you’re, frankly,
0:26:14 unlikely to have to escape from prison or take part in a Cavalry Charge.
0:26:19 Or it’ll just be very unsuccessful at attempting to escape prison.
0:26:26 Modern lockdown. I can’t let this go. It’s sticking in my mind, the core strategy,
0:26:30 I’m not sure strategy is the right modifier for that, but that Napoleon used, it seems like that
0:26:37 was waiting to be used. But it took him to be in the position, of course, of Emperor France,
0:26:42 whereby he could impose it. But equally, there are other things like the Code Napoleon that
0:26:48 were not really waiting to be used. He had to sort of work them up into a body of laws that
0:26:54 are completely revolutionized at France. Now, when he took the writing from 30 years prior
0:27:01 and applied it, is it the position that enabled him to do it? Or did he think about risk differently
0:27:05 than other people? And that is part of what allowed him to implement it.
0:27:13 He’d taken huge risks. He was 26 years old. And according to the Churchill view of life,
0:27:17 you can take risks when you’re 26 years old because people will forgive you. Actually,
0:27:22 the French Revolution, government would not have forgiven Napoleon if he’d lost the army of Italy
0:27:30 in 1796. But nonetheless, he was a huge risk taker. He would attack when normal generals would have
0:27:35 fallen back. He was very lucky in that he was fighting, he was 26, he was fighting generals
0:27:43 who were Austrian generals who were in their 70s. He used to hit the hinge of enemy forces. If you
0:27:49 have in an Austrian Sardinian army, for example, he would hit the point between the Austrians and
0:27:55 the Sardinians, pushing them both back along their own supply lines and so on. He used psychology,
0:28:01 a great deal trying to get into the minds of the generals he was opposed to. He was a great
0:28:07 chooser of lieutenants, of divisional commanders and people who he felt he could trust. Superb sense
0:28:14 of timing as well in a battle. He was, as I say, the sort of exemplar of so many of the
0:28:20 leadership tropes. Do you think he would have viewed his decisions from the outside that look
0:28:27 risky as risky? If someone takes uncalculated risks over and over again, then you could call
0:28:33 them reckless. But at least to face value, that’s not maybe the adjective I would use.
0:28:38 They came off. This is the thing. In the Italian campaign, this first great campaign of his,
0:28:48 he hardly lost a battle. He fought 20 and 119 of them. If you do that, even though you have taken
0:28:53 risks, it’s a sort of force multiplier in a sense. You wind up thinking that they aren’t as risky.
0:28:58 He did believe in luck, which was very important. He famously said that he wanted his marshals to
0:29:04 be lucky. He would promote people if he thought they were lucky. That, of course, runs against
0:29:11 everything that we 21st century rationalists can possibly believe in, but it worked for him.
0:29:19 Yeah, it seems to have worked. Until it doesn’t. Until it doesn’t promote the unlucky guy.
0:29:26 The decision in 1812 to march on Moscow was hugely risky and, of course, it didn’t pay off.
0:29:29 Is it true that you have a signed letter from Albus Huxley?
0:29:32 I do. All right. Now, Albus Huxley, I believe.
0:29:34 Oh, so sweet English. Albus.
0:29:40 You know, I’ve realized the longer I spend in England, I really need to, I think I should take
0:29:45 TOEFL classes. Test of English is a foreign language. Need to brush up on the mother tongue,
0:29:51 as it were. He died if I’m not wrong the year you were born. I think it was.
0:29:54 Why do you have that letter? And what does the letter say?
0:30:01 The letter actually was written from Los Angeles, where he was living in the 1950s. It was in 1959.
0:30:06 Somebody just wrote to him asking for his autograph. Obviously, he also asked,
0:30:10 “I don’t have the letter from the autograph hunter.” But he obviously asked for some
0:30:18 sort of deep, meaningful thought. And the deep, meaningful thought that Huxley gave him.
0:30:23 And I’m a huge admirer of Huxley, Eilish and Gaza, and obviously Brave New Worlds,
0:30:28 and so on, wonderful works. And he said in this letter that men do not learn
0:30:34 much from the lessons of history is one of the most important of all the lessons that history
0:30:40 has to teach us. And that is so true, isn’t it? I mean, there’s not a book that I’ve written.
0:30:43 I’ve written 20 books. There’s not a book that I’ve written when I haven’t looked
0:30:49 across that frame letter in my study and thought, “Wow, that is just so perceptive.”
0:30:55 So, I have a question about the subtitle of your biography on Churchill, which you believe
0:31:00 is “Walking With Destiny.” You mentioned this holy fire, I think, is the term you used earlier.
0:31:07 But do many of the leaders you’ve studied have this belief, and I may not be wording
0:31:11 this the best way, but of being chosen by destiny in some fashion?
0:31:21 The phrase comes from his remark in the last chapter of the last few pages of his war memoirs,
0:31:24 the first volume of his war memoirs, “The Gathering Storm,” wonderful book.
0:31:30 And he’s referring to the day that he became Prime Minister, the day he was appointed by
0:31:35 the King as Prime Minister, which happened to be coincidentally, as it turned out, because Hitler
0:31:40 didn’t know he was going to become Prime Minister, on the same day that Hitler invaded in the West,
0:31:45 invaded Belgium and Luxembourg and Holland shortly afterwards, of course, to invade France.
0:31:50 And he said, “I felt as if I were walking with destiny and that all my past life had been
0:31:58 but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” And he had a profound sense of personal
0:32:04 destiny. Now, you and I might think as 21st-century rationalists that this is a bit sort of mad
0:32:11 to think that you’re preordained to save, in this case, Britain and civilization. If you
0:32:16 said that to me, that that was your belief about yourself, I would think that you were clinically
0:32:23 insane. But enough things had happened to Churchill in his life. He had had so many close brushes
0:32:29 with death that it’s not insane to think that. But it’s not by any means just… And Napoleon
0:32:35 also felt that he had a star to guide him. And he had the luck that we spoke about earlier,
0:32:42 but that luck, who was a woman in his case, was somebody he needed to woo and to try to seduce.
0:32:49 And of course, in 1812, she turns her back on him and he speaks of her in that sense.
0:32:55 Which is also a pretty insane way to look at life, isn’t it? But they were both, as I mentioned
0:33:01 earlier, devotees of the ancients, of Caesar and Alexander the Great, both of whom also of course
0:33:07 had this driving sense of personal destiny. And so it does exist in people.
0:33:13 If you could, I’ll give you two options. Stand in, meaning take the place of one of the people you’ve
0:33:20 studied in depth, or just simply witness them in a given moment or day or period in their lives.
0:33:26 What might you choose? Well, first of all, I wouldn’t want to stand in their place at all.
0:33:32 I know that I don’t have the intestinal fortitude of these extraordinary people,
0:33:37 but it would be the day that I just mentioned. It would be the 10th of May, 1940, the day that
0:33:43 Hitler’s invading the cabinet meets and recognizes that Neville Chamberlain is
0:33:50 not the man to continue on the war now that it’s turned to the West. And the meetings that took
0:33:57 place the previous day and that day, whereby Neville Chamberlain goes to the king and suggests
0:34:02 Churchill. And the king wasn’t terribly excited about Churchill either because they’d fallen
0:34:06 out over the abdication crisis and he thought Churchill was a bit of a loose cannon. But
0:34:11 nonetheless, he’s willing to call Churchill. Churchill then goes to Buckingham Palace and
0:34:17 becomes prime minister and comes back and starts to organize his government as the news is coming
0:34:23 in of the German success and victories on the Western front. I mean, this is what a day,
0:34:28 what a day in history that must have been. So if I could be a fly on the wall any day in history,
0:34:35 that’s the day that I would choose. Can we just go back though to this concept of a sense of
0:34:43 destiny because of course, it isn’t just great men as in good men, positive forces in history
0:34:49 that has this. Adolf Hitler also had a sense of destiny when he was in providence and luck and
0:34:55 being watched over by bigger forces and so on. When he survived his assassination attempt on the 20th
0:35:02 of July 1944, when you remember Staufenberg moves the briefcase with a bomb in it to a point in the
0:35:08 table that just shreds Hitler’s trousers when it goes off and doesn’t kill him. He also put it down
0:35:14 to providence that he had been allowed to survive and therefore to stay in charge and the Fuhrer
0:35:19 was going to save the Fatherland and the Reich. So it’s not something I don’t want your viewers
0:35:25 and listeners to come away thinking that it’s a really good thing to think that you’re being
0:35:30 watched over by a more powerful force who’s saving you to become the world-saving figure.
0:35:38 You can cut a lot of different ways. I think of David Curesh and cult leaders and Jim Jones down
0:35:43 in Ghana where he was. All of these fruits and crooks and corn men use it as well.
0:35:50 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:37:22 Are there any particular weaknesses or pathologies or failures that come to mind
0:37:28 in, say, Churchill and Napoleon or others who helped to make them ultimately great in the
0:37:32 ways that they were great? Oh, definitely. Definitely. The key thing is learning from mistakes,
0:37:39 which not all politicians do, I need to scarcely point out. But Churchill certainly did. He made
0:37:44 mistake after mistake. He got female suffrage wrong. The abdication crisis that I mentioned
0:37:51 earlier, he joined the gold standard at the wrong time at the wrong level. The blackened hands in
0:37:57 Ireland was a disaster. Primarily, of course, the Dardanelles crisis of 1915 to early 1916,
0:38:04 where over 100,000 Allied troops were killed, wounded or captured. This was a series of mistakes.
0:38:11 In every single one of them, he learned from those mistakes. How did he do that? Because
0:38:15 there’s probably, I would think, maybe some method behind the madness. Maybe it’s just
0:38:19 more self-awareness or reflection. But did he have a process for learning?
0:38:25 He wasn’t hubristic. That was the key thing. I think it probably helps also, of course,
0:38:31 to do is in the democratic system, unlike Napoleon or Hitler, whereby he was criticised
0:38:35 the entire time in the House of Commons for all of those things, and he had to defend them,
0:38:41 and therefore had to, in a logical and rational point. I mean, democracy worked very well at
0:38:47 pricking the pomposity and hubris of people if it’s working properly. And Napoleon also learned
0:38:53 from mistakes in his military career. And I don’t believe that the decision to march on Moscow itself
0:39:01 was hubristic. I’m slightly aside from a lot of military historians about this. But just to
0:39:08 explain, he’d beaten the Russians twice before. He had an army twice the size of the Russians.
0:39:12 He knew perfectly well that the winter was going to come. He’d stayed too long in Moscow. But if
0:39:18 he’d gone to Moscow and then come back again immediately, he would not have had the climactic
0:39:24 disasters that overcame him with the blizzards in the October and November of 1812. And so
0:39:31 you have this sense that, yes, it was a appalling strategic error, but it wasn’t done out of a
0:39:37 drive because he thought he was a sort of demigod. That, I think, is a misunderstanding of his
0:39:44 personality. So I’m going to ask something that Neil Ferguson of Colossus on the Shelf
0:39:49 put in an email. I would ask Andrew about the diary he keeps, which is a source of intense
0:39:54 anxiety. He’s obsessed with this. Okay, finish the rest of it. Which is a source of intense
0:39:58 anxiety to all of his friends and even more to his enemies. Best wishes, Neil.
0:40:05 Neil doesn’t care about any of that. He’s only cares about what I say about him. He is the friend
0:40:13 who is obsessed with the diary. Yes, I keep a diary. For God’s sake, is it such a crime?
0:40:21 We went on the skiing holiday this year and it’s all he talked about. He’s obsessed.
0:40:25 Is it the forbidden fruit? What is the story here?
0:40:30 I think he’s kicking himself that he didn’t keep on. You think of all these extraordinary
0:40:37 people he meets. Every time I see him, he’s just been talking to President G or Bibi Netanyahu
0:40:42 or President of America. And he doesn’t write down and keep it all in the diary. So I think
0:40:49 there’s an element of envy going on here, frankly. But I find it very relaxing and calming
0:40:56 to think that my life isn’t just going to be a complete waste of time.
0:41:03 And one of the only ways that I can… I can see that. Thank you. Well, that’s kind of you. Thank you.
0:41:11 One of the only ways that I can justify this concept that it’s all not just a sort of, you know,
0:41:17 nihilistic sort of maelstrom. Boondoggle. Boondoggle, exactly. Is by writing books,
0:41:22 obviously, which I hope will survive me, but also noting down what I’ve done in the day. But
0:41:28 nihil is convinced that every time he says anything embarrassing or something, I’m going
0:41:33 to be… You’re just loading the ammo into your diary. Exactly. And then when we’re sort of 80,
0:41:42 he’s going to go to the bookshop, buy the diary, flick to Ferguson, Neil, and see sort of 40 entries,
0:41:48 each of which is going to make his face go red at the following charges. Exactly. Which it’s not
0:41:53 going to be like that at all. What he’s actually going to do is to immediately go to the diary and
0:41:58 look up Ferguson, Neil. But see all the amusing, charming, intelligent remarks he’s made, the
0:42:02 witchisms, you know, and all that kind of thing. And not just him, obviously, everybody I’ve ever
0:42:09 met over the last 40 plus years. And how do you keep your diary? You’re on your metal now. You’re
0:42:15 going to have to, I’m going to say, went on to be on best behavior. Exactly. What an idiot.
0:42:22 Note to self, send chocolates to Andrew. Don’t forget his birthday.
0:42:29 Now, there are many, many people who keep a diary. How do you keep your diary? Is it
0:42:36 nightly exercise? Is it typed out as a pen, as a quill pen? You mustn’t do it nightly because,
0:42:41 or at least you might be able to, but I drink. And so, I like drinking to it.
0:42:46 Yeah. And so there’s nothing worse than trying to write. If you’ve been drinking also,
0:42:51 writing down the witch-isms, sometimes there’s a bit of a problem, to the fact that I can’t
0:42:56 read my writing that morning. But no, it has to be done pretty much the next morning. You can’t
0:43:01 leave it for two weeks or so. Do you do it with what’s your frequency? I used to write it every
0:43:06 day. I used to write it. Oh, no, but if nothing interesting has happened, then I won’t put anything
0:43:14 down. Nothing to report. Yeah, no. It’s all like Louis XVI on the 14th of July, 1789,
0:43:18 the day of the fall of the Bastille. All he writes is, “Rian, nothing.”
0:43:25 So I hope I’m not going to be quite as moronic as that. It’s not really intended for publication,
0:43:29 which is another thing that Neil doesn’t understand. He’s going to latch on to the really
0:43:34 part of that sentence. He’s going to be like, “You see? You see?” Yeah. No, of course he is.
0:43:38 But nonetheless, I do find it, well, you mentioned earlier about how many words I write. It’s never
0:43:44 more than about 500 words maximum. And it picks the most interesting part of the day.
0:43:49 And if somebody has said or done something interesting, I’ll stick it in.
0:43:52 Do you do that before your book writing? Let’s say you’re on YouTube.
0:43:54 Yes, first thing in the morning.
0:43:57 All right. And is that just like pajama slippers and a cup of coffee or…?
0:43:59 Yeah, so I see that. Yeah, all right, great. Exactly.
0:44:07 And do you take…? This seems like such a ridiculous question, but how do you think about
0:44:10 taking breaks when you’re writing? I mean, obviously, you might have a bathroom break or
0:44:14 something like that. Do you build in breaks? Do you write the flow as long as you have it?
0:44:16 What does it look like? The flow as long as you have it. Absolutely. Yeah,
0:44:23 yeah, yeah. Because it might not come back if you deliberately have a break sometimes.
0:44:30 And I’m slightly loath to admit this public, but unless sometimes, if you are really flowing,
0:44:37 I can go without washing for three days. I can be in my dressing gown and slippers. My wife finds
0:44:42 it extremely unhygienic and I’m not allowed to sleep in the same bed. But I will, if I’m running
0:44:50 hard at a really difficult chapter and I need to keep my thoughts in order, I will not waste
0:44:56 time doing anything. I’ll get some breakfast and so on, but that will just be a dash to the kitchen
0:45:01 and back again. Because you’ve got to get… If something’s complicated, and there are lots of
0:45:07 occasions, another classic as well, we go back to the 10th of May, 1940, that in my Churchill book,
0:45:12 you have to get it right because every minute, not just every hour, every minute something is
0:45:18 happening, they’re getting news from what the love father’s attacking and he’s then having to
0:45:21 create his government. He then goes off to the House of Commons and so on.
0:45:29 It’s just relentless. And unless you encapsulate in your mind successfully what is important
0:45:34 about that day, you’ll never get it over to the reader. And if you’re constantly going off and
0:45:38 going for a walk or going to the gym or showering or whatever, there’s a danger that you’re going
0:45:45 to fall out of the rhythm of creativity. How do you think about that flow when you have the flow?
0:45:49 I mean, there is… A hastened ride is never more than three days I’ve ever gone without a shower.
0:45:54 I wouldn’t judge. I was just on a hiking trip. I went 10 days without showering,
0:46:00 so I don’t judge. I won’t throw stones in my glasshouse. It’s only when I’m right in the book.
0:46:06 I hastened to add that as well, God. I don’t want people to come up and show off their nose and go,
0:46:12 “Hello, Andrew.” How do you think about that flow with writing? So there’s one reason not to interrupt
0:46:19 the writing. If you have a hard task ahead of you and you have 47 balls in the air and if you drop
0:46:23 them, you’re going to have to start the juggling process all over again. The boot up sequence
0:46:32 takes a long time. How do you think about the flow of writing or that feeling that things are coming
0:46:38 to you more easily or moving on to the page more easily? Sometimes it’s a very bad thing. Of course,
0:46:44 Dr. Johnson did say when you have written your most brilliant purple paragraph,
0:46:48 read it again and rip it up. Tell him more about that.
0:46:52 Oh, yeah. Well, if you think that you’ve just written something completely brilliant,
0:46:58 there’s a very good chance that it’s rubbish. It has to be somebody else. It has to be your
0:47:04 publisher or some other person who can read it and have a completely objective eye,
0:47:08 because there’s a very good chance that you’re hugging yourself with glee about something that
0:47:12 actually you think sounds wonderful. But in fact, it’s complete. It’s complete.
0:47:16 Be the name of my memoir, Hugging Yourself with Glee. I’ll write that down. Give you your
0:47:22 customary 5%. That’s fine. If you had to choose, maybe you don’t want to choose from your darlings
0:47:26 here, but if this question has an answer, you don’t even need to name them, but you keep a
0:47:31 person in mind. If you had to choose one person to act as your proofreader for your work, to be
0:47:36 that sanity check. He’s called Stuart Prophet. He’s the most brilliant publisher in London.
0:47:41 He’s known by everybody to be the most brilliant. He’s also the most irritating,
0:47:48 he, oh my God, for my Napoleon book. He’s going to listen to this, so I’m going to have to be as
0:47:55 nice as possible. But he’s Professor Perfect is my nickname for it, because he’s a total professorial
0:48:02 kind of figure. And for my Napoleon book, I remember a series of marginalia. And again,
0:48:06 this is the thing where you think you’ve done something rather good. And he writes,
0:48:10 well, one of the things he wrote in the moment, are you sure this joke is funny?
0:48:16 Nothing more crushing than to have that. He also wrote…
0:48:22 Strangely, he’s very British also. Exactly. Question mark, you know. And you read it again,
0:48:30 you chortle to yourself, and you go, yes, it is funny. And you go, damn it. But he wrote,
0:48:34 there were a whole series of them in the, well, we were talking earlier about the 1796 campaign
0:48:41 of Napoleon. He said, how wide was the River Poe in 1796? There was another one, did Napoleon
0:48:48 take Herodotus to Egypt? I don’t know, I’m going to have to find out, you know. He’s a genius,
0:48:55 but also a very irritating person. Could you say more about what makes him so good?
0:49:00 I’ll buy some time just by saying, if I can’t find a writer friend of mine, let’s just say,
0:49:06 or an editor who can proofread my work, I’ll very often give, and I write a particular type of thing,
0:49:11 but I would give my chapter, let’s just say, to a friend who’s a really good lawyer. And part
0:49:17 of the reason for that is that they’re very good at trimming out excess. And if anything is ambiguous,
0:49:22 they’re good. Or contradictory. Or contradictory. They’re very good at surgically excising that.
0:49:26 What makes this particular gentleman, what was his name again, Stuart?
0:49:32 Stuart Prophet. Great man. What makes Stuart so good at giving feedback?
0:49:44 Does he see things differently? He’s a profoundly committed to history. He loves history. So he has
0:49:50 a sort of higher purpose to try to flood the world with great history books, which is, as far as I’m
0:49:53 concerned, the greatest purpose that you can have. I mean, he doesn’t get better than that.
0:50:02 He has a very logical brain. He’s very good on syntax. So anything that doesn’t sound right
0:50:09 in a sentence, he will point out. Sometimes to have sound right from a poetic perspective.
0:50:16 If there’s a rhythm that isn’t right, or if something rhymes as well, sometimes you can
0:50:21 use two words that have a rhyme in them, and he will cut that automatically because it just
0:50:26 doesn’t feel right. Sit well with his sensibilities. Precisely. And mine, I hasten to add, because I very
0:50:33 rarely actually disagree with him. I did on the joke, by the way. And whenever anybody tells me
0:50:38 that that particular joke is funny, I forward it to him. I forward it to him. I ping the email
0:50:46 straight on to Stuart. Of course I do. I’d be mad not to, wouldn’t I? But no, there’s a, I mean,
0:50:50 and he’s been doing it for 40 years. And he’s at the top of his trade. So you would expect him to
0:50:55 be really good, but boy is he. So those two examples you gave, the width of the river and
0:51:03 Herodotus, why did he ask those two? Because he is always trying to put himself into the
0:51:10 mind of the reader and wondering what the reader would be thinking. And he thought, rightly or
0:51:14 wrongly in this case, that the reader would be interested in the width of the river and whether
0:51:19 or not Herodotus went with him. But there are loads more examples like that. I will send him
0:51:25 100 pages and he’ll send me back 100 pages of questions and criticisms and remarks. I almost
0:51:30 sometimes think that I ought to put his name on the front cover of the book. He phoned me up,
0:51:36 actually, about the Napoleon book. And the original of Napoleon just had a huge N on it
0:51:42 and lots of Bs. And he phoned me up and he said, “I’ve got this idea for the front cover of the
0:51:48 book. Your name isn’t going to be on it.” And he said, “And neither is Napoleon.” And I thought,
0:51:54 over the phone, I thought, okay, he’s finally gone completely mad. Yeah, exactly. That’s right.
0:51:58 Poor man. How long can he stay in his job if he’s going to come up with ideas?
0:52:02 Hope he can fake it for a while. Yeah, exactly. But it can’t be long now.
0:52:08 And it turned out to be a totally brilliant concept because if you see a gigantic N with Bs,
0:52:13 you think of Napoleon. And that’s what… Bs as an absolute idiot.
0:52:18 Bs, like honeybees. Honeybees, yeah. That was his symbol. It was a Napoleon symbol
0:52:22 because they could sting but they could also give honey, you know, that was the idea.
0:52:27 And it just captured people’s imagination and sold an awful lot of copies, which was really great.
0:52:29 That’s sold half a million copies that book now. That’s incredible.
0:52:33 That is incredible. Sounds like such a gift to have a steward. I need a steward.
0:52:36 Yeah, everyone needs a steward. Everyone needs a steward. Don’t take mine.
0:52:43 No, I don’t… I don’t… I think you might find… You might spend his entire
0:52:47 first month on just the syntax errors in my first chapter.
0:52:49 You do want to strangle him, by the way, because…
0:52:52 This is the sign of a very good proofreader often.
0:53:00 Why do you think it is that some historical figures take on these mythic proportions where
0:53:08 some who have huge impacts seem to fall into obscurity over time? Are there particular characteristics?
0:53:16 Is it self-made, in a sense, where people create that myth of themselves while they’re still alive?
0:53:20 How do you think about that? I haven’t thought about that before. That’s a really good question.
0:53:27 I think that it’s a bit like… There are some things that are very difficult to get over to people
0:53:32 on the printed page. Charisma is one of them. Charm is another one. Sexy-ness.
0:53:38 These are things that we all know from our own lives matter enormously. If somebody is charismatic,
0:53:43 charming and sexy, you’re going to want to be interested in them, follow them much more than
0:53:50 somebody who isn’t, and yet explaining how they are, any of those things, very famously hard to
0:53:59 explain. I think the same is true with historical characters. How can it be that this unprepossessing,
0:54:05 looking American president who happens to, with his strange beard but not moustache,
0:54:12 who happens to be president at the time that the country is falling apart, manages to save
0:54:16 the country through this terrible, see it through this terrible civil war and then is
0:54:20 assassinated right at the end of the civil war? The story is so extraordinary, isn’t it?
0:54:25 Yet to explain the Charisma and Charm, not sexiness, I don’t think, you know,
0:54:30 Ram, Lincoln’s case, but many of your listeners or readers might disagree with me or none the
0:54:38 less. Just imagining him popping up on a dating app. Which he swiped right to the left for Abe,
0:54:43 Lincoln. Exactly. Might ride a fixed-gear bike, make expensive cappuccino. That’s kind of the
0:54:51 hipster look. Anyway, I digress. It is difficult to explain how some people just grab the headlines
0:54:57 and others don’t. I mean, of course, it does help to be a leader in a war. That’s true of Lincoln
0:55:04 and Churchill and Napoleon and so on. The chance of coming a world historical figure if you are
0:55:10 Prime Minister of Luxembourg in a time of peace is going to be much more difficult, of course.
0:55:14 But, yeah, there doesn’t seem to be a hard and fast rule, does there?
0:55:20 Hard and fast recipe. And I can follow. I’m just kidding. Well, don’t take us to war on the back
0:55:26 if you’re wanting to be memorable. I don’t think I’m capable. Certainly not eager. Makes me think
0:55:34 of, “What is the title of that poem? Ozymandias, Look Upon My Works in Despair.” I’ll leave that
0:55:39 alone. I met a traveler from an antique land who said, “Two vast and chunkless legs of stone stand
0:55:44 in the desert, and near them on the sand half shrunk and shattered visage lies, whose wrinkled
0:55:50 lip and snare of coal command tells that its sculpture well those passions read, which yet
0:55:56 survive. My name is Ozymandias. King of kings, look upon my works, almighty in despair. Nothing
0:56:03 besides remains round that eternal wreck, long and bare, the lone and level sand stretch far away.”
0:56:08 Hot damn. There you go, listeners. Can you point out to the listeners that
0:56:13 you didn’t tell me that this was going to happen? I did not. I did not send a memo in advance.
0:56:21 And I suppose the preface to that is that there are these ruins sticking out of the sands.
0:56:26 They’re the feet. The feet, that’s right. The trunks of the legs. So there was obviously
0:56:35 a huge, magnificent pyramid high, glorious statue to Ozymandias. And now there’s nothing.
0:56:38 And it goes back to what I was saying earlier about not being remembered.
0:56:43 Did you remember the… Now I’m going to, I feel like I’m cross examining, but asking too much.
0:56:47 But who is the author of that poem? P.S. B. Shelly.
0:56:55 I saw the one of, maybe the original, or certainly a first draft in Oxford,
0:56:59 because I was going through a program at Wadham College and there’s an exhibit on right now,
0:57:06 which is something like cut, paste, rewrite. And it shows the hand edited works of Mary Shelly,
0:57:10 Frankenstein, and all these others. And I came across that.
0:57:14 If anybody wants to see a first edition of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein,
0:57:21 it’s just gone on exhibition at the, I was there this morning, Lambeth Palace Library.
0:57:27 There’s a thing called Her Book. It’s about early female writers. It’s a brilliant exhibition.
0:57:33 And so if there’s anyone in London who’s interested in seeing that book, it’s there today.
0:57:38 Beautiful. And if you’re near Oxford, Western Library has the exhibit that I was mentioning,
0:57:43 a lot of gems, a lot of gems. You have some really fun old stuff in the UK, it turns out.
0:57:48 I’m not going to take that personally. No, no, no, no. That’s a compliment.
0:57:55 Yeah. Old in the US is like 1970, you know, it’s smaller. I thought you were talking about me.
0:58:08 How do you think about legacy? Because I, along the lines of Anya the Ozymandias piece, I’m like,
0:58:13 is it just sort of hubris to believe in the first place that that’s something worth aspiring to,
0:58:18 having something last and stand the test of time? I mean, how do you personally think about this?
0:58:20 Well, especially as someone who studies history.
0:58:26 Yes. And I obviously do want people to read my books long after I’ve died.
0:58:32 Now, I’m not going to know whether they are or not. So why on earth, it just seems so illogical to
0:58:38 even think that, doesn’t it? That it should matter to me that anything happens the second
0:58:46 after I’ve died. But I know that I do. And it is one of the drives for being a writer because words
0:58:53 always live forever. And they’re virtually the only thing that does. Ozymandias’ statue
0:58:57 is just two trunkless legs of stone. Whereas actually, his words, you know,
0:59:02 look upon my works, he mighty in despair, that goes to the heart of the human condition.
0:59:08 And Shelly’s poetry still survives in a way that Ozymandias’ statue doesn’t. So there is something
0:59:16 about words that are immortal. And we’re all sort of grasping for immortality in one way or another.
0:59:23 Oh, yeah. Same as true. Do you read fiction? Yes. Yes, I do. When I go on holiday, which is usually
0:59:31 hiking, actually, with my wife, she loves going to places that involve mountains. And in order to
0:59:38 get history completely out of my system for the two weeks or so that we’re hiking, I do read fiction.
0:59:45 Sometimes if I want to completely clear my brain, I’ll have a detective novel. And I’ve chosen the
0:59:50 most complicated of all of the detective novelists, a chap called Robert Goddard. Have you ever heard
0:59:56 of Robert Goddard? I have not. So complicated to work out who done it or what groups of people
1:00:04 done it. It’s very rarely just one person and why. And I try and make notes in the back of the book
1:00:09 connecting each person to everybody else. And so by the end of it, it looks like one of those
1:00:14 really complicated sort of management things. Oh, it’s like an order chart. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
1:00:20 With hundreds of people connecting to everybody else to try and work out who done it. And he
1:00:27 always, always beats me. Yeah, that sounds fun. Yeah, I’ve been getting… But as far as sort of
1:00:34 high culture writing is knowledge concerns, I will occasionally do that. I’m president of the
1:00:40 Clifton Literary Festival. And so we have lots of novelists come to that. And so if you’ve got
1:00:44 William Boyd or Salman Rushdie or somebody who you know you’re going to be bumping into at the
1:00:49 festival, it’s always a good idea to read their latest novel. We had Robert Harris recently. And
1:00:56 so that’s always well worth doing. And then there are a few writers like Michel Wellbeck who is
1:01:01 just so great that you have to sort of read whatever he brings out.
1:01:05 Is there… I don’t recognize the name. I’m embarrassed to say.
1:01:11 He’s a French writer. It’s pronounced hella beck. And he’s a genius, a very controversial and
1:01:17 quite unpopular in France. And the latest one I’m reading is where it features his own murder.
1:01:23 It’s a great satire. It’s very, very funny.
1:01:27 Is there a book you might suggest starting with or we’re going to start with one?
1:01:33 The Map and the Territory. The Map and the Territory of Michel Wellbeck.
1:01:40 The name starts H-E-L-L-E-B. And yeah, it’s a sort of satire on French
1:01:44 intellectual customs and… I can see them loving that.
1:01:45 It’s very funny. It’s very funny.
1:01:47 Why is he controversial?
1:01:49 Oh, because he’s been deeply politically incorrect as well.
1:01:55 Oh, he just doesn’t care. He just doesn’t care what he writes.
1:01:57 He’s a honey badger in that sense. Do you know what I mean?
1:01:59 I do. I do. I do.
1:02:02 He’s a literary honey badger as Wellbeck.
1:02:07 Very honey badger. All right, so it’s being politically incorrect.
1:02:14 How should we, in your mind, write about imperial history?
1:02:21 We should try as far as possible to be genuinely objective.
1:02:26 We shouldn’t take the assumption that all white people, whenever they went abroad,
1:02:30 did so solely in order to rape, murder, massacre, and exploit.
1:02:35 Because certainly in the latter parts, we were talking earlier about Winston Churchill
1:02:41 and the Noblesse Ablige, the concept that it was part of your duty as a privileged person
1:02:46 to try to make the world a better place for other less privileged people.
1:02:51 And that was, especially in the last part of the British Empire,
1:02:55 a driving force for a lot of people, especially, obviously, missionaries and Christians,
1:03:02 but also other people, explorers and people who are involved in agriculture and so on.
1:03:06 You know, they actually were not driven by rapacity and greed
1:03:11 in the way that essentially the Marxist analysis of imperialism has made out.
1:03:14 So be objective. Some of those people were like that.
1:03:20 Undoubtedly, of course, they were, you know, especially some of the people in Southern Africa
1:03:25 and elsewhere. But for a long period of the story of the British Empire,
1:03:31 for much of that empire, it actually was a force for human good rather than evil.
1:03:40 What do you see as the challenges moving forward for the capturing of history?
1:03:44 And/or how do you see it changing as we move forward?
1:03:50 I am quite worried about it in Britain because, first of all, fewer and fewer people seem to be
1:03:54 taking it as a subject at a university level.
1:03:57 Secondly, we have this thing, it’s nicknamed Henry to Hitler,
1:04:03 where we jump from the Tudors to the Second World War, and we don’t do the very important
1:04:09 intervening stages of the stewards, the Civil War, the Hanoverians, the loss of America,
1:04:12 the really anything up to the outbreak of the First World War.
1:04:18 And there’s so much of really important history in that period
1:04:24 that we seem to jump from one to the next. There was a survey quite recently of British
1:04:28 teenagers, quite a big survey, over a thousand of them. And 20% of them
1:04:36 thought, like 23% of them, thought that the American War of Independence was won by Denzel
1:04:40 Washington. You know, and the Americans get a bad round.
1:04:42 Yeah, I know, I know, exactly.
1:04:43 It’s not just us.
1:04:48 And also, there were 20% of these kids, these are British school kids,
1:04:52 who also thought that Winston Churchill was a fictional character.
1:04:55 And that Sherlock Holmes and Eleanor Rigby were real people.
1:05:02 So whatever’s going on in British history teaching, I think there’s still a lot to be desired.
1:05:08 If you had never been able to write any books in that alternate reality,
1:05:14 what have you personally, or what would you have gained personally from studying history?
1:05:18 It’s a lot of things, isn’t it, history? It can be a bit of a quicksand.
1:05:19 In what sense?
1:05:27 Well, as soon as you think you understand a period, all it takes is one new set of
1:05:34 papers or a new book written by somebody else, the friends especially, that can make you look
1:05:40 again at the same period and completely change your mind about it. And that’s a little unnerving
1:05:46 at the age of 61, I have to say. I’m just reading Ronald Hutton’s second volume of his life of
1:05:53 Oliver Cromwell, which has just been published. And I’d always thought of Cromwell as somebody who
1:06:02 had a set of principles that he moulded his times around in order to see through.
1:06:08 And Ronald Hutton has completely exploded that thesis for me. And I realised that he was,
1:06:14 like most politicians, just sort of grabbing the coattails of history and hanging on as much as he
1:06:21 could. And yes, he was a good soldier and so on. But he was, in terms of his politics, he was
1:06:25 constantly trying to create alliances, of course, like all politicians do,
1:06:29 and when opportunities came, he grabbed them. But he was at the mercy of events much more than
1:06:35 creating them. Whereas I had for years had the sort of image of Oliver Cromwell like that statue
1:06:40 outside Parliament of this incredibly solid figure. He wasn’t like that at all.
1:06:45 What are other things that attracted you to history?
1:06:51 It wasn’t just Christopher Perry. My dad read history at Oxford. And he used to take me around
1:06:57 castles. We go on holiday to Wales and see the great Edward the First Castles.
1:07:03 And he would chat to on journeys we’d chat about history and what ifs, the counterfactuals and
1:07:11 things like that. And so I grew up feeling very comfortable with it and recognising that it’s a
1:07:18 beautiful and fascinating thing. Whereas I think sometimes some people can be not scared of history,
1:07:24 but they can be put off history because they weren’t taught it very well at school, or they
1:07:28 just thought it was a succession of dates, or they can’t see any relevance to their daily
1:07:35 lives and so on. And I’ve never been one of those people. So if you were doing a presentation,
1:07:43 could be anywhere, on why people, aside from conflating Denzel Washington with other historical
1:07:52 figures, why they should read history or engage with history, what would the thrust of the
1:07:58 presentation be? I suppose it does come back to that all this Huxley quotes about trying to learn
1:08:05 some of the lessons. There’s a marvellous moment when in 1953, June 1953, at the time of the
1:08:11 late Queen’s coronation, Winston Churchill is walking across Westminster Hall, this fabulous,
1:08:17 great hall that was when it was built in the late 13th century, the largest room in Europe.
1:08:22 And it’s fused with history. It’s where, of course, where Churchill himself was to be
1:08:28 to Lion State, but also where the Monarchs Lion State, where Warren Hastings went on trial and
1:08:34 Charles I went on trial and people like Mandela and Zelensky have given speeches and things like
1:08:40 that. It’s compounded, Thomas Moore went on trial there, the Earl of Stratford. I just mentioned
1:08:45 a whole load of people who were all decapitated actually, William Wallace as well, he was decapitated
1:08:51 as well. And so you’ve got this sense of all of British history, it sums up in a room essentially.
1:08:56 And a young American student stops Churchill and asks essentially for a piece of life advice.
1:09:02 And Churchill replies, “Study history, study history, for therein lies all the secrets of
1:09:08 statecraft.” And that would be one of the reasons that I would tell people, you know, that if you
1:09:13 want to understand what’s going on in the world, you do have to look and see what has happened
1:09:18 before. And there’s no person who doesn’t want to have a better understanding of what’s going on
1:09:25 in the world or try to work out for themselves, the great forces in our planet today. So that I
1:09:31 suppose would be the answer. That’s why I’ve chosen study history as my motto of my coat of arms,
1:09:36 for example, and why I’ve got a podcast too, and I call it secrets of statecraft. I think that’s a
1:09:43 sort of motivating factor. Secrets of statecraft, that is. It’s the Hoover Institution’s podcast,
1:09:49 but it’s great fun to do. Must have Neil Ferguson on at some stage, and I can tease him about not
1:09:57 keeping a diary. What is statecraft? I think I know, but I want it very often. I think I know
1:10:03 something, and it is in fact not true at all. So it’s the ability to run a country. So you’ve got
1:10:09 to juggle the diplomatic, the military, the economic, the cultural, all of these things,
1:10:16 the religious, all of these things together to create the kind of country that you want it to be,
1:10:21 and that is statecraft. And so it’s been going on as long as human history has, and always will.
1:10:28 Looking forward, let’s see, you’ve studied many great figures from history. You’ve looked at these
1:10:35 different chapters of your late king, your last king, George III. I wrote a biography of him
1:10:40 a few years ago, which was great fun to do. Sorry, carry on. No, that’s all right. I was
1:10:44 just going to ask you, looking forward, given how much you’ve reflected backwards,
1:10:51 where do you think things are going for the UK and/or for the US? If you were a betting man,
1:10:58 there’s a good chance it’s not a certainty, but if the dominoes continue to fall the way they’re
1:11:06 falling, A, B, or C. I’m afraid I’m a bit of a pessimist. Yeah. Not so much for the United States,
1:11:14 because you’re still such a rich and innovative country. But I’m wondering in Britain, whether
1:11:19 or not, and history plays an important part of this, especially the way in which history is
1:11:24 used politically, to wonder whether or not we still believe in ourselves,
1:11:30 certainly in the way that we did when I was growing up. In 20, I’m going to try and get the
1:11:40 statistics right. I think it’s 2015. As recent as 2015, maybe it’s 2010, 86% of people were proud
1:11:48 of British history. That has now fallen down to 56%. And I’m sure that the reason for this is the
1:11:55 sustained attack on the British Empire that we were discussing earlier, and people forgetting the
1:12:01 part that we played in the abolition of slavery and concentrating just on the horrors and the
1:12:08 monstrous things that happened. And therefore, if you’re not proud of your past, you’re not proud
1:12:14 of your ancestors, you’re not proud of the things that they produced, and Britain has produced some
1:12:21 pretty extraordinary and wonderful things for the world. Then it’s difficult to see why anyone
1:12:27 would want to be proud of the future of the country as well. And so I’m pretty pessimistic.
1:12:33 And when I feel pessimism for America, it’s for things like taking Thomas Jefferson’s statue
1:12:40 down from the New York City Hall. It’s a form of cultural suicide. It strikes me not to
1:12:46 admire the founders of your nation. And yes, of course, he owned slaves,
1:12:51 but he also wrote a constitution that has survived for a quarter of a millennium.
1:12:57 And he was brave enough, and Washington and all the others, brave enough to stand up against
1:13:03 the most powerful empire in the world. These things, you deserve your statue, it seems to me.
1:13:10 And if you go around pulling these things down, I think you’re breaking a kind of living link with
1:13:16 the past that makes you a great country. And that’s certainly happening in this country as well.
1:13:21 I mean, I’m a bit of a pessimist anyway, because I’m a Tory. And pessimism is an essential part
1:13:28 of the Toryism. But not as big a pessimist I hasten to add as Neil Ferguson, who I like to say
1:13:34 it’s never terribly difficult to tell the, it’s a quote from PG Woodhouse, never terribly difficult
1:13:41 to tell the difference between a ray of sunshine and a Scotsman with a grievance. And Neil always
1:13:46 tells you that it’s all doom and gloom and everything’s going to be utterly disastrous.
1:13:51 I wonder whether or not he truly believes it, because he’s actually himself, a very, you know,
1:13:56 upbeat and personally sort of positive individual who does lots of things that imply
1:14:00 that actually he does think the world’s going to get better. But boy, oh boy.
1:14:07 How do you personally, if you do, I mean, it seems like you examine or you have a fascination with
1:14:15 counterfactuals, the what ifs, you read books that have the potential for upending long held
1:14:22 theses, which can be uncomfortable, I would imagine. Do you have people around you or who you
1:14:29 deliberately expose yourself to who offset perhaps some of your pessimistic tendencies with
1:14:36 forms of optimism that they can defend? Yes, my wife is the classic example. She’s
1:14:40 optimistic about the future. She’s in business. She’s a very successful business woman. So she
1:14:46 actually sees a lot of the innovations that are taking place, the drugs that are coming online,
1:14:52 that are saving lives and taking on defeating pain and so on, you know, she’s great at
1:14:58 believing in the innate capacity of capitalism to reinvent itself in a positive way for more and
1:15:03 more people than take people out of poverty and all of those positive things. It’s an invigorating
1:15:10 thing to talk about the world with her, because it makes me much less sort of eore-like and
1:15:20 furgoth sonness. I feel like any other inside scoop that people should know about Neil,
1:15:29 what is his secret optimistic voice memos that he sends you, you can annotate, add to your diary.
1:15:37 Please see audio reference 47. Andrew, this has been great fun. You have many books
1:15:42 that people can read certainly and they’ll all be in the show notes, but is it most recent conflict?
1:15:50 Yes, that’s a book I wrote with David Petraeus. And of course, him being a general who’s commanded
1:15:57 armies of over 160,000 in both Iraq and Afghanistan has been so fascinating intellectually for me,
1:16:01 because of course, I’m a military historian, I’ve never worn a uniform for one minute,
1:16:06 so that was great. And the subtitle for folks just so they have that, The Evolution of Warfare
1:16:16 from 1945 to Ukraine. Well, it’s now actually Gaza, the paper that takes us up to Gaza as well,
1:16:21 about halfway through that campaign in Gaza. It was after the Russian invasion of Ukraine
1:16:26 that I came up with the idea of writing the book and I got on to David, who I knew,
1:16:32 and said, why don’t we write this as a military history? There are going to be lots of political
1:16:38 histories about this, but just the military side of it and put it into the context of all the wars
1:16:43 that have happened since 1945. So we go through not all of them, there are 400 of them, but all
1:16:50 the key ones, you know, the 40 or so key ones that you’ve heard of and that show how war has
1:16:55 evolved and developed. And sometimes it leaps forward and other times it goes into sort of
1:17:00 side shows. But we went to the publishers and they quite unsteadily said, well, how are you
1:17:04 going to divvy up the chapters? And I said, well, David’s going to write about all the
1:17:11 countries he’s invaded. And I’ll, you know, fill in the rest. And he also did the Vietnam
1:17:16 chapter as well, actually. And then we sent hundreds and maybe thousands of emails to one
1:17:22 another over the course of the year or so that we were writing it. That’s very fast. It is fast.
1:17:27 It is fast. But the thing was, well, because the situation in Ukraine was moving so quickly.
1:17:32 And then the Gaza war broke out on the day of the publication of the hardback. So that was
1:17:38 literally the 7th of October that we were bringing that out. So we then needed to get on with writing
1:17:43 about that as well. And as you know, I tend to write quickly. And so does he. He’s a soldier
1:17:50 scholar. He went to your old university. He was at Princeton doing a post-grad on military history.
1:17:55 So he was very much able to keep sending back those emails.
1:18:04 Yeah, I suppose he’s not lacking discipline would be my guess. What did you find were
1:18:09 key ingredients to that successful collaboration? What made it work, especially with that type of
1:18:15 pressure under deadline? Well, I think there was, I know there was mutual respect, which is very
1:18:19 important. I’d never written a book with anybody before. And I was in the midst of doing that right
1:18:23 now, which is probably the reason I’m asking. Yeah. No, well, it’s like nerve wracking,
1:18:29 isn’t it? Because one can get very sort of preparatorial about one’s work. But that wasn’t
1:18:36 the case with David, because the insights that he gave about what it was like to be a commander into
1:18:43 wars at the absolute apex of command meant that he could then look back on wars like the Korean
1:18:50 War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War to sort of place himself in the position of Matthew Ridgway,
1:18:58 in Korea, for example. And that was so fascinating that I knew that there was nothing that I could
1:19:05 add to that. I just knew that the combination of the soldier and the historian would produce
1:19:12 something that was really intellectually stimulating for me. And that’s, in the end, life is a constant
1:19:20 battle against boredom, isn’t it? It’s a constant rearguard action against not being stimulated.
1:19:25 Do you think you will do more collaborations? How are you thinking about your writing moving
1:19:30 forward? No, my next two books are just going to be written by me. I’ve got Napoleon and his
1:19:37 marshals about how the emperor interacted with his marshals and how the marshals interacted with
1:19:42 each other. They fortunately all hated each other, so that’s much easier for a historian to write
1:19:47 something interesting. And hated each other in very imaginative ways. The greatest reality TV
1:19:55 should have ever seen. Exactly. And then after that, I’m doing Disraeli. And he’s an extraordinary
1:20:02 character who was a complete outsider as a Jew, of course. Didn’t go to one of the British public
1:20:08 schools or Oxford and Cambridge or any university and through his own brilliance. And he was a
1:20:14 novelist, of course, also his own wit. He wound up becoming the most powerful man in the world.
1:20:19 Yeah, I look forward to reading that one. Good. Thank you. Let me back on the show in 2030,
1:20:25 which is when it’s being published. I hope I’ll still be around. We’ll see. I’ve been here for a
1:20:29 decade. We’ll see how it goes. Andrew, this has been great. I really appreciate you taking the
1:20:34 time. People can find you. Correct me if I get any of this wrong. Andrew-roberts.net.
1:20:38 Would that be the main website? That’s what I have here. Can’t remember, but yes, I hope so.
1:20:42 Let’s just say that’s right. And if it’s not, I will put correct version and show notes.
1:20:49 And then is Twitter or X as it stands now a good place for people to follow you as well?
1:20:55 Yeah, that has things like my podcast and so on. Perfect. So that’s as I have it here,
1:21:04 @aroberts_andrew. Is it good? Perfect. We’ll fact check off that. But we do have that. Is there
1:21:09 anything else that you would like to add? Any requests of my audience? Anything at all that
1:21:14 you’d like to mention? Just thank you so much, Tim, for being on the show. I’ve really enjoyed
1:21:19 it. Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time. This has really been great. And for people who are
1:21:25 listening, as always, you can find the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. We will include links to everything
1:21:31 we discussed. And also, as always, until next time, just be a little kinder than is necessary
1:21:35 to others, but also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in.
1:21:42 Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday.
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1:22:18 all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast
1:22:25 guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field. And then I test them and then I
1:22:31 share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness
1:22:35 before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you’d like to try it out,
1:22:42 just go to tim.vlog/friday. Type that into your browser, tim.vlog/friday. Drop in your email and
1:22:48 you’ll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Shopify.
1:22:53 Shopify is the all-in-one commerce platform that powers millions of businesses worldwide,
1:22:57 including me, including mine. What business you might ask? Well, one way I’ve scratched my own
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1:23:13 it’s delicious. The first coffee I’ve ever produced myself, I drink it every morning. Check it out.
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1:24:33 all lowercase, Shopify.com/Tim. In the last handful of years, I’ve become very interested in
1:24:40 environmental toxins, avoiding microplastics and many other commonly found compounds all over the
1:24:46 place. One place I looked is in the kitchen. Many people don’t realize just how toxic their
1:24:51 cookware is or can be. A lot of nonstick pans, practically all of them can release harmful
1:24:57 forever chemicals. PFAS, in other words, spelled P-F-A-S, into your food, your home, and then
1:25:03 ultimately that ends up in your body. Teflon is a prime example of this. It is still the forever
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1:25:28 So that means zero forever chemicals and durability that will last forever. I was very skeptical. I
1:25:32 was very busy. So I said, “You know what? I want to test this thing quickly. It’s supposed to be
1:25:36 nonstick. It’s supposed to be durable. I’m going to test it with two things. I’m going to test it with
1:25:42 scrambled eggs in the morning because eggs are always a disaster in anything that isn’t
1:25:48 nonstick with the toxic coating. And then I’m going to test it with a steak sear because I want to see
1:25:57 how much it retains heat. And it worked perfectly in both cases. And I was frankly astonished how well
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1:26:19 It’s tough enough to withstand the dishwasher, open flame, heavy-duty scrubbing. You can scrub
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