Andrew Roberts, who was born in 1963, took a first class honours degree in Modern History at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, where he is an honorary senior scholar. 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 the controversial, but no less well-received Eminent Churchillians in 1994. As well as appearing regularly on British 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 Daily Telegraph.
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 Napoleon and Wellington, an investigation into the
relationship between the two great generals, was published
by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and was the lead review in all
but one of Britain's national newspapers. January 2003 saw
the publication of Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership,
which coincided with Roberts's four-part BBC2 history series.
Roberts holds an honorary doctorate from Westminster College, Missouri. He has two children, Henry, who was born in 1997 and Cassia, who was born in 1999, who live in Edinburgh. He lives in Belgravia in London with his wife, Susan Gilchrist, the senior partner of the corporate communications firm Brunswick Group and a Governor of the Southbank Centre.
In 2004, he edited 'What Might Have Been', a collection of twelve 'What If?' essays written by distinguished historians, including Antonia Fraser, Norman Stone, Amanda Foreman, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Conrad Black and Anne Somerset.
In 2005 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 Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Estonian and Spanish.
Masters and Commanders, which was published in 2008, won the Emery Reves Award of the International Churchill Society and was shortlisted for The Duke of Westminster’s Gold Medal for Military History and The British Army Military Book Award, both of Britain’s two top military history prizes. The Storm of War was published in August 2009 which reached No.2 on The Sunday Times bestseller list.
Roberts is interested in public policy and sits on the boards or advisory councils of a number of think-tanks and pressure groups, including The Centre for Policy Studies, The European Foundation, The Centre for Social Cohesion, The United Kingdom National Defence Association, The Freedom Association, the British Weights and Measures Association and The Bruges Group.
Roberts is a judge on the Elizabeth Longford Historical Biography Prize, chaired the Conservative Party's Advisory Panel on the Teaching of History in Schools in 2005, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has also been elected a Fellow of the Napoleonic Institute and an Honorary Member of the International Churchill Society (UK). He is a Trustee of the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust and of the Roberts Foundation, and is currently the chairman of judges of the Hessell-Tiltman History Prize. More information about him can be found in Who's Who.
