Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia (born 13 January 1963), is an English popular historian and journalist. He is the Bonnie and Tom McCloskey Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Lehrman Institute Distinguished Lecturer at the New York Historical Society. He was a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, London, from 2013 to 2021.
Roberts's historical research has focused mostly on English-speaking nations, particularly those closely tied socially to the United Kingdom, such as the United States. Roberts is known internationally for his 2009 book The Storm of War, which covers socio-political factors of the Second World War, such as Adolf Hitler's rise to power and the administrative organisation of Nazi Germany. It received the British Army Military Book of the Year Award for 2010, and achieved commercial success, reaching No. 2 on The Sunday Times best-seller list. Much of Roberts's later work, including his 2014 and 2018 biographies of Napoleon and Sir Winston Churchill, has been widely praised. Roberts's public commentary has additionally appeared in several British publications, such as The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, including his support for Atlanticism within international relations.
Early life and education
Andrew Roberts was born in Hammersmith, London, on 13 January 1963, the son of Kathleen () and Simon Roberts, a business executive. Simon, from Cobham, Surrey, inherited the Job's Dairy milk business and also owned the British franchise of Kentucky Fried Chicken. A prolific reader as a child, Roberts soon gained a passion for history, particularly for dramatic works relating to "battles, wars, assassinations and death".
Roberts attended Cranleigh School in Surrey and read modern history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association. He graduated with a first-class honours BA degree and took a PhD in modern history.About Andrew Roberts – Andrew Roberts, British historian, British history writer, Masters and Commanders, A History of the English Speaking Peoples since 1900 |https://www.andrew-roberts.net/about-andrew-roberts/Andrew Roberts – The Octavian Report | https://octavianreport.com/contributor/andrew-roberts/ Roberts began his career in corporate finance as an investment banker and private company director with the London merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co., where he worked from 1985 to 1988. He published his first historical book in 1991.
Historical and socio-political viewpoints Commentary on history In the context of the First World War, Roberts believes that the treaty obligations imposed on the German Empire should have been significantly tougher. He has stated that the victorious powers of the Entente alliance should have broken up Germany into component sub-national territories akin to the disorganised situation prior to the unification of Germany in the mid-1800s. Ultranationalism was eventually "burned out of the German soul", in Roberts's opinion, at a truly devastating cost.
Roberts's analysis of the Second World War states that the Nazi German government had significant advantages in military organisation and economic power early in the war. He has argued that, if someone other than Adolf Hitler had control of the nation's military strategy, the country would likely have forgone a costly direct invasion of Soviet territory, which occurred through Operation Barbarossa, and instead would have swept through Mediterranean territories before trying to seal off British-controlled Middle East areas. Roberts has stated his belief that likely morale-building victories against the comparatively weak forces to the southeast could have allowed Hitler to essentially win the war.
According to Roberts, the other key strategic mistake was the German declaration of war against the United States, which was announced only four days after the Pearl Harbor attacks despite the fact that the Nazi regime had no legal obligation to take such an action. Roberts has stated that, after the declaration, Germany could not keep the US war-making economic machine at bay. Thus, in his view, the "mistakes, delusions, and exaggerated self-confidence complexes that the fascist government fostered proved its undoing."
Roberts has additionally stated that he views Joseph Stalin's control of the Soviet Armed Forces as having been disastrous to the allied efforts against the Axis powers. He has commented that Stalin's obsessive tactics of killing his own men for ideological reasons cost him thousands upon thousands of troops. He claimed that in the Battle of Stalingrad alone, Soviet forces killed the equivalent of two full divisions of their own personnel.
More recently, Roberts has whole-heartedly embraced Thatcherism. He is a staunch backer of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her socio-political legacy. In Roberts's opinion, Thatcher's decision to keep Britain out of the euro currency, while retaining strong ties with various European economies and otherwise engaging in international trade, has been validated by the Eurozone crisis in the aftermath of the Great Recession. After the British prime minister Tony Blair of the Labour Party resigned, Roberts assessed him as an "exemplary war leader" with his "vigorous prosecution of the War against Terror", which would leave him regarded as a "highly successful prime minister". In the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, Roberts backed the "Leave" vote.
Support for the Iraq War and military intervention Roberts supports a strong American military and has generally argued in favour of close relations between the Anglosphere nations. As an advocate for the general principle of democratic pluralism, he has argued that "[s]neered at for being 'simplistic' in his reaction to 9/11, Bush's visceral responses to the attacks of a fascistic, totalitarian death cult will be seen as having been substantially the right ones" in the long run. In many writings, he has come out in support of neo-conservative influenced socio-political viewpoints.
During the buildup to the Iraq War, Roberts supported the proposed invasion, arguing that anything less would be tantamount to appeasement, comparing Tony Blair to Winston Churchill in his "astonishing leadership". He additionally argued that acting against Saddam Hussein was in line with the "Pax Americana realpolitik that has kept the Great Powers at peace since the Second World War, despite the collapse of Communism".
In 2003 Roberts wrote: "For Churchill, apotheosis came in 1940; for Tony Blair, it will come when Iraq is successfully invaded and hundreds of weapons of mass destruction are unearthed from where they have been hidden by Saddam's henchmen." When such weapons were not found, Roberts still defended the invasion for larger strategic reasons, while arguing that his past views were based on credible assessments from intelligence services as well as other sources.
Antisemitism Roberts treats antisemitism as "a particularly virulent form of racism against Jews" and argues that pro-Palestinian demonstrations can involve racial hatred against Jews even when such hostility is presented as opposition to Israel. Roberts criticises sections of the political left for what he regards as hypocrisy in failing to defend Jews after decades of campaigning against racism, and calls for a "culture of moral abhorrence of antisemitism". He conceives of antisemitism as an ancient phenomenon which, like a "plague bacillus", changes its outward form while remaining essentially the same. He argues that Jews are "on the front line of the West's present struggle between civilization and Islamist fundamentalist totalitarian barbarism" and concludes that "Gentiles must stand with the Jews, come what may."
Roberts interprets the reaction following the October 7 attacks as a reversal in which Jewish victims, rather than the perpetrators, became objects of condemnation. He describes denial of the atrocities as "a modern form of Holocaust denial". He rejects the assumption that higher education guards against antisemitism, arguing that "much of the worst antisemitism is nowadays to be found being spread on elite Western campuses, often by people with PhDs," and noting that most of those at the Wannsee Conference also held doctorates.
Israeli–Palestinian conflict Roberts sees the existence of a sovereign Jewish state as the safeguard that "guarantees that the obscenity of genocide will never again befall the Jewish people". He rejects the claim that Jewish migration to Israel is colonialism since Jews who move there are returning to their "homeland of 30 centuries". He also rejects the apartheid analogy as "entirely erroneously used against Israel" by pointing to the civic, legal and electoral rights enjoyed by Arab citizens of Israel, whom he argues have "far better civil rights than many Arabs living in neighbouring Arab states".
Roberts argues that during the Gaza war, the Israel Defense Forces fought with "exemplary ethical consideration" in "horrendous circumstances" and to "an ethical standard equivalent to the best in the world". He is critical of Western attempts to pressure Israel through sanctions, such as the measures promoted by Ed Miliband in 2026, arguing that Israel is "a sovereign democracy whose voters should be left to decide such issues at the ballot box, not through diktats from London, Paris and Ottawa", and asking, "Where's the morality in sanctioning a small democracy like Israel, but not large autocracies?"
Roberts denies that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are "the obstacle to peace" and instead defines "Palestinian rejectionism" as the central impediment, arguing that Palestinians have "never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace". He calls the UK government to de-recognise Palestinian statehood. For him, the UK recognition of Palestine in 2025 "reward[ed] Hamas for its 7th of October attacks". He states that "settler violence is indefensible" and that Israel "should hold those responsible to account". He also supports banning what he calls "pro-Palestinian hate marches" during a national emergency where they feature racial hatred against Jews.
Political opinions Roberts endorsed Kemi Badenoch in the 2024 Conservative Party leadership election.
Authorship and television appearances Early works The first of Roberts's books was a biography of the Earl of Halifax, Foreign Secretary to Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill, entitled The Holy Fox, and published in 1991. Roberts provides a historical revisionism account of Lord Halifax, a one-time viceroy of India and the foreign secretary in Chamberlain's government. Halifax has been charged with appeasement, along with Chamberlain, but Roberts argues that Halifax began to move his government away from that policy vis-à-vis Nazi Germany following the 1938 Munich Crisis. This work was followed in 1994 by Eminent Churchillians, a collection of essays about friends and enemies of Churchill. A large part of the book is an attack on Admiral of the Fleet the Earl Mountbatten of Burma, and other prominent members of the elite. The title is an obvious allusion to the famous and similarly combative book of biographies Eminent Victorians.
In 1995 Roberts published The Aachen Memorandum, a thriller novel based on Britain and its relationship with a fictionalised European Union. In 1996, Roberts offered his "personal view" of the Suez Crisis in an Open Media production for BBC TV. Radio Times described the programme: "Forty years after Eden's decision to deploy troops against the Egyptians, Andrew Roberts argues that the former prime minister should be congratulated, not chastised, for fighting to protect British assets."