Prof Andrew Roberts, who was born in 1963, took a first class honours degree in Modern History at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, from where he is an honorary senior scholar and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD).

He is presently the Bonnie and Tom McCloskey Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a Visiting Professor at the War Studies Department at King’s College, London, and the Lehrman Institute Lecturer at the New-York Historical Society.

He has written or edited twenty books, which have been translated into twenty-eight languages,  and appears regularly on radio and television around the world. Based in London, he is an accomplished public speaker (see Speaking Engagements), and has delivered the White House Lecture, as well as speaking at Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Princeton and Stanford Universities, and at The British Academy, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Sandhurst, Shrivenham and the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

In 2011, NBC commissioned him to commentate alongside Meredith Viera on the Royal Wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton, following his broadcasts at the funerals of Diana, Princess of Wales and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and the wedding of Prince Charles to the Duchess of Cornwall. He also commentated for NBC on The Queen’s Diamond and Platinum Jubilees, the birth of Prince George of Cambridge and the funerals of Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II.

His biography of Neville Chamberlain’s and Winston Churchill’s foreign secretary, the Earl of Halifax, entitled The Holy Fox was published in 1991, to be followed by Eminent Churchillians in 1994. As well as appearing regularly on British and American television and radio, Roberts writes for The Sunday Telegraph and reviews history books and biography for that newspaper as well as The Spectator, Literary Review, Mail on Sunday and Wall Street Journal.

In 1999 he published Salisbury: Victorian Titan, the authorised biography of the Victorian prime minister the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, which won the Wolfson History Prize and the James Stern Silver Pen Award for Non-Fiction. In September 2001 he published Napoleon and Wellington, an investigation into the relationship between the two great generals. January 2003 saw the publication of Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership, which coincided with Roberts’s four-part BBC2 history series.

Prof Roberts has two children; Henry, who was born in 1997 and Cassia, who was born in 1999. He lives in London with his wife, Susan Gilchrist, who is the Head of Global Clients at the corporate communications firm Brunswick Group.

In 2004, Prof Roberts edited What Might Have Been, a collection of twelve ‘What If?’ essays written by distinguished historians, including Antonia Fraser, Norman Stone, Amanda Foreman, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Conrad Black and Anne Somerset.

In 2005 Roberts published Waterloo: Napoleon’s Last Gamble, which was published in America as Waterloo: The Battle for Modern Europe. The publication of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 brought him an invitation to the White House in February 2007, where he delivered the prestigious White House Lecture. His books have been translated into Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, Marathi, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

Masters and Commanders, which was published in 2008, won the Emery Reves Award of the International Churchill Society and The Storm of War was published in August 2009 and reached No.2 on The Sunday Times bestseller list, and won the British Army Military Book Award for 2010.

Roberts sits on the boards or advisory councils of ding Policy Exchange, The Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, The UK National Defence Association, and he holds an honorary doctorate from Westminster College, Missouri. He is a founder member of President Jose Maria Aznar’s Friends of Israel Initiative.

Prof Roberts chaired the Conservative Party’s Advisory Panel on the Teaching of History in Schools in 2005, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society. He has also been elected a Fellow of the Napoleonic Institute and is an Honorary Member of the International Churchill Society (UK). He is also a Trustee of the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust.

In 2012 he was awarded the William Penn Prize (former recipients include President Ulysses S. Grant, Gen. George C. Marshall, Walt Whitman and Earl Mountbatten) as well as the British Schools and Universities Club of USA ‘Pride of the Century Award’. In May 2013 the Prime Minister appointed him a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery. In 2013 he was the Merrill Family visiting professor at Cornell University, and in 2014 his biography of Napoleon Bonaparte was published, which won the Grand Prix of the Fondation Napoléon, awarded to him by the Princesse Bonaparte at the British Embassy in Paris, and The Los Angeles Times Biography Prize 2015.

In February 2016, Prof Roberts was elected President of the Cambridge University Conservative Association, a post previously occupied by Rab Butler, Francis Pym and Michael Howard. In June he was awarded the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation’s Prize for his contribution to ‘increasing the world’s understanding of pivotal world events’. He won the New Criterion Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society for 2018. For five years he chaired the Lehrman Institute Prize for Military History at the New-York Historical Society.

Andrew is president of the History in Prisons Project, and Founder-President of the Cliveden Literary Festival – www.clivedenliteraryfestival.org – which has been described as ‘The most dignified and beautiful literary festival on the planet’ by Alain de Botton and by Ian McEwan as ‘probably the world’s best small literary festival’.

Andrew is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. By a vote passed nem con in the State Senate and House in Austin and subsequently signed by the Governor and Secretary of State, Andrew was made an Honorary Citizen of Texas in March 2019.

His biography of Sir Winston Churchill, Churchill: Walking With Destiny, was published by Penguin in October 2018, became a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller, was translated into nine languages, and won the ICS Churchill Award for Literacy and the Council on Foreign Relations’ Arthur Ross Prize. ‘In a single volume,’ Henry Kissinger wrote of it, ‘Roberts has captured the essence of one of the world’s most impactful, most memorable statesmen. ‘It is the crowning achievement of his career – and it will become the definitive biography of his subject.’

In October 2021 Andrew published George III: The Life and Reign of Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch, which won the General Society of Colonial Wars Distinguished Book Award, the History Reclaimed Book of the Year Prize and the Elizabeth Longford Historical Biography Award. In 2022, Roberts published The Chief: The Life of Lord Northcliffe.

In November 2022, Andrew was elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Roberts of Belgravia.

In October 2023 Andrew co-authored with General David Petraeus a book entitled Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare From 1945 to Gaza, which became a New York Times bestseller.