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

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/fe2c21dafb503544

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers or
Deconstruct those who deconstruct world class performers. In the case of today's guest, who is Andrew Roberts, Andrew Roberts has written twenty books, which have been translated into twenty-eight languages and have won thirteen literary prizes.
These include Masters and Commanders, The Storm of War, A New History of the Second World War, Napoleon, A Life, Churchill Walking with Destiny, George III, The Life and Reign of Britain's Most Misunderstood Monarch, and most recently Conflict.
The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Gaza, which he co-authored with General David Petreus. Lord Roberts is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society. The Bonnie and Tom McCloskey, distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford,
and a visiting professor at the Department of War Studies at King's College, London. He is also a member of the House of Lords. You can find all things Andrew at AndrewHenrobits dot net online and he is also on X, the artist formerly known as Twitter at X dot com slash A Roberts underscore.
Andrew. And we're gonna get to the interview, but quickly, before that, just a few words.
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Optimal minimal.
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. So then I also do post some questions.
No se

My cyber netting organism living tissue over metal mental skeleton.
Pleasure to meet you. Thank you for taking the time. Thanks so much, Tim, for having me on this show.
I thought we would start with
Cranley.
After your A levels. Did you now?
What did you know that's the way that's the way we're gonna make friends and uh and get on with each other sleeves and get the
You're gonna mention the reason I was expelled from school.
I'm gonna mention the reason because you don't know the reason. Oh, absolutely, good. Okay. I don't think I'm the first person ever, as a young man, to get drunk and climb up buildings. You know, that's absolutely not time on our tradition, I think Hallelujah that I'm not the only person this happened to. But quite understandably
The school chucked me out before I fell off one of them, you know, and they'd and they'd have got blamed. It led to actually one of my wife's most brilliant witticisms. She's very funny woman, my wife, and she said, Yes, and all Andrew's done since in life is to get drunk and social climb.

That is clever. It's not bad, is it? Uh we might come we might come back to that. Yeah. It seems like also maybe it's hard for me to tell given the British school system, although I did go to St. Paul's in New Hampshire, where they do have the third, fourth, fifth, sixth form, and so on. So that much I know. But I think in the same piece where I found the Cranley bit in doing the research,
Also found note that you're approached as a possible candidate for MI six.
A bit later on.
No, that was when I was
I was at Cambridge. Cambridge. Yes, yes, absolutely. That's the right time to be approached for MI6 is because Cambridge and MI6 have had a a long and and fairly disastrous career, needless to say. All of the worst spies in the nineteen thirties, traitors of the nineteen thirties went to Cambridge. But yeah, it was a fascinating thing. I uh
I was just going down from university and somebody in my college, one of the Doms there, who's still there actually, I'm thinking about it.
approached me and said, How about it would you be interested in becoming a spy? And so automatically, needless say, you just think of yourself as James Bond immediately. That sort of dandeland kicks up the soundtrack in the back of your brain, you're automatically there with your Baretta and the beautiful women and all of that kinda
Yeah.
But I then had to actually do the process of where you need to join, which I did get through.
And it was completely
hilarious. I mean it was you couldn't satirize it, basically. They asked you things like there were
hundreds of questions and you had to answer them very, very quickly. And some of them were
Things you'd expect, like, you know, what are the five longest rivers in the world kind of thing. Put them in order and all that.
There were also things like place in order of social precedent.
Prince, Duke, Viscount, Marquis, Baronet. Oh, I'm out. I would have thrown in Cookie Master. You're American. You're allowed to that They're not gonna ask that in the CIA. But in for some reason in MI6, back in this was, I hasten to add back in the sort of mid nineteen eighties.
That was one of the questions.
What did the Don think made you uh
Potential candidate.
Well that also is a little bit annoying, really, because
He told me later about how he had been interviewed by MI6, and one of the things he'd been asked is
And is Andrew a kind person?
And
This person said, No, not not really and he saw the person interviewing him put a tick.
And the margin next to the question.
Wonder if that made you more or less desirable. Much more desirable, as far as they were concerned. They they take the the thing. Right.
I can understand. Well James Bond, he's not a kind person, is he, really? No. No, no.
We view them as disposable pleasures.
So let's
See if we can
Take off the initial layers of the onion with respect to history.
Christopher Perry, Mr Christopher Perry.
Who's that?
He was my first history teacher when I was at prep school.
Which in the English version means when you'll sort of tend to
Thirteen.
He's dead now, but he was a inspirational history master. He taught history in the way that I think it should be taught, in a narrative way of explaining really, you know, what happened next and why. He believed in the great events, the great sort of wars and battles and things like that. And he was a uh
Kind man. He wouldn't have made it into MI6. But he was a sort of old school history master of the best possible kind.
What?
Characterise that.
Maybe
Would you be able to contrast the status quo as it goes in terms of teaching history and then
How his style most
Different from that.
He taught it as the most exciting story you're ever going to hear.
Basically, which has the extraordinary added
advantage of being completely true. He'd sort of sit cross legged on the table
And
give you the voice of Charles the First and then the voice of
Oliver Cromwell, you know, he uh Elizabeth the first and Mary Queen of Scots, he would entrance you with the excitement of the unfolding story, every word of which would be true.
It would have loads of dates in it. At the end of the term, each of the terms, the semester, you'd be tested on three hundred dates.
and not a child in that class didn't get at least two hundred and ninety eight of them right. Extraordinary way of teaching, and did it entirely through inspiration, rather than through
Just sort of standing there on the blackboard.
Ordering people to remember.
You know, what happened in thirteen fifty six or fourteen fifteen.
Did he have any theater background? You'd have thought. You'd have thought sitting cross-legged on the desk is going to get a requisite
minimal amount of attention from the students, which is brilliant. Automatically. Of course, exactly. No, I mean
Now I come to think of it, of course he was overacting from day one, but he didn't seem to be at the time, at least as far as the as the ten year old Andrew Roberts was concerned.
Yeah, we have a s sort of rental library behind us in this room that I've rented and one of the books
Sitting over there, the power broker does an amazing job of end of chapter cliffhangers. That's I think Robert Carrow over there.
And he managed to make
Urban development. Essentially that book's about urban development, isn't it? And he managed to make that
Interesting. But you've got a few other ones. You've got a great friend of mine there, Neil.
Ferguson uh writing about in his book, uh Colossus. You've got you've got some pretty uh
interesting people, few people that I've
Met and um yeah, so I you might have rented it, but it's a pretty good um. And uh it's also
Quite surreal that's not.
Neil is featured here since he he is, I'd say, partially responsible for us meeting in the first place. We'll see. We'll see about the sense of humor. We'll see later when the jury is out.
I found
In writing history, and I'm paraphrasing here, but I believe you've said before that you're cautious around the words perhaps, maybe possibly
Especially probably.
Yeah.
Could you explain why? Don't use them. They're cheat words. What they're saying to the reader is
I haven't worked hard enough on this. I don't know. I'm gonna just come up with some kind of theory here. Bear with me.
You shouldn't do that. If the person's paid forty dollars for your book, he or she is going to want to think you know what you're talking about. So if something is a great story.
And you're not sure it's
True, but nonetheless it's funny or it shines a light onto personality, or for some reason there's a great reason why you need to put it in the book. There are loads of ways that you can hint to the reader, you know, you can say,
It is said that, or the story is told that, or you know, anecdotally people stated that, you know, and and that's the signal to the reader, this is probably not true at all. But it's yeah, but it's too good to leave out.
But perhaps uh probably a maybe and so on, there you really are hedging your bets. And I think it breaks the bond of trust that you need to have with your reader.
Would you mind speaking to the importance of
Steady nerves or self control in crisis. It seems that that's
Something that recurs.
And
The reason I'm asking about it is
This would be I suppose a sub question. How much of it do you think is nature versus nurture also?
But feel free to take that and
Any direction you like.
Both Napoleon and Churchill.
were educated in war.
You know, they both went to military colleges.
So as their level of command grew as they grew older, the
sense of responsibilities they had, the number of men essentially that they were controlling.
increased exponentially.
So they had
the intellectual background.
They had the training as well.
And
as young men in both cases.
They thought a lot about war about Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great and and so on. They had a
Egotism.
to look at it in the negative way, but as self confidence to look at it in a positive way.
that gave them the ability to take these
shatteringly important decisions. So I think it's much more nurture than
the nature.
And
No, in both cases as far as they were concerned.
There was a
sort of holy fire.
that they both had. There was a not holy in a in a religious sense, obviously, because neither of them were at all religious, but in a sort of deeper spiritual sense.
a belief that what they were doing
Was
so good and right and proper and had to be done that they were not kept up a awake at night.
over even the the death of friends. Mm-hmm.
Different friends that they were responsible for.
In the cases of Churchill and Napoleon, we could bring up other names, or I suppose when using the royal we here, you could bring up other names.
Were there particular philosophers or writers that they uh
found particularly instructive. They
leaned on in some sense that they found solace in were the particular minds
Well certainly Churchill did because he was a huge reader. He was a massive autodidact. He never went to university and so therefore when he was a young Subaltern in India
In his early twenties he he sat down and and read the greats.
philosophers as well as um
as well as writers and he
was particularly influenced by
Gibbon and Macaulay.
the two great nineteenth century historians, English historians, and that affected his
writing style and of course later his uh oratorical style, but also his outlook on on life.
philosophical outlook on life. With regard to Napoleon, he was even more literary really, because he also wrote short stories and
Books and and so on.
And so he was very much affected by what
He read again as as a young man, and
And in both cases it's slightly they were reading so much that it slightly cut them off.
from their um contemporaries. Uh Napoleon didn't have many friends when he was in his early twenties.
And
Churchill when the other people were were, you know, off sleeping in the in the midday heat of India.
His colleagues and comrades.
He'd be sitting there reading, you know.
shopping out and giving them a coolie and so on.
How did Gibbon and McCauley inform his philosophical
Leanings.
They made him into what was called at the time a wig.
We don't have them today, obviously, but they were
In modern sense, I suppose liberal conservatives
We believed in noble oblige.
in the importance. N nobless oblige. It's a almost a
medieval concept where your duty, if you have privilege, is to work for the greater good of the community, to protect widows and orphans, to it's a sort of like the knightly chivalric concept that you get from the Middle Ages.
And they very much believed in that, and so did uh Churchill.
Let me ask about Napoleon. So I know shockingly little about Napoleon, I'm embarrassed to admit, and I do want to ask more about
Churchill as well, but
You've described him as the prime exemplar of war leadership. Why do you say that?
There are lots of military leaders who can do
a lot of things. But he was the only one that I can think of who could do all of them.
Of course it helps if you're winning and he uh in the last uh three years of his uh of his military career, he was losing.
But even s then
Even when he had far fewer
troops when he was retreating, when he was defending Paris in the eighteen fourteen campaign, for example, he was still able to win five victories in seven days.
in the eighteen fourteen campaign, that's two years after the retreat from Moscow.
It's quite extraordinary that
capacity.
And he was able to win
Whether he was advancing or retreating, whether he was defending a town or attacking it, whether he was attacking on the right
or left flank, or sometimes straight through the centre, as at Austerlitz. He had that
capacity that that mind for military conquest but also
Of course the greatness that was required.
Completely to revolutionize
French society. People think that the French Revolution revolutionized society, you know, the clues in the name, as it were. But in fact the long lasting things that actually dragged
France into the nineteenth century were things like the
Code Napoleon.
which were not a revolutionary um concept, they were a Napoleonic concept.
This may seem like a
A lazy question, but since I'm operating from a deficit here with respect to knowledge of Napoleon.
What do you think it was that allowed him to be a decathlete of war?
as it were, being good at all of these different facets. And I think of
how we might analyze different athletes and what
Allows them to
exercise the capabilities we see, sort of breaking it down into its component parts. But how would you describe
What enabled him to do that where others were unable.
It was inspiration but also perspiration. He really did put in the time.
thinking about it.
and reading about it by it I mean I mean warfare.
And of course you've been educated
in it. He read the key books. There's a guy called the um Comte de Giobert, who in seventeen seventy two wrote a book about strategy
And tactics and he
Thirty years later,
put these into operation.
and so he was able to spot the
sort of best of the best when it came to
Um modern thinking.
And to or in this case thirty year old thinking, in fact. That didn't matter because the weapons of war hadn't changed in
Yeah.
And he was able to put those
of thoughts and ideas into practical use. The classic example being the core system.

And when the core system. It's basically
Sorry.
Uh C O P S
And what he did with them was to
create mini armies essentially.
Which were able to march separately, but converge and concentrate for the battle. And so one of your corps would engage the enemy and then he would use the other corps to outmaneuver and envelop the enemy, sometimes double envelope the enemy. It was a brilliant concept. And uh actually the Allies didn't start beating
Napoleon until
they had also adopted the core system. He was always at the cutting edge of thinking of the new
Concepts.
And
At the same time.
He had very old fashioned
Views about how to excite the men.
And he uh I mean victory obviously is the is the best thing when it comes to exacting courage. Exactly. Nothing nothing m much works better than that. But as I say, he was still winning at the end of his career. But he had this belief that to appeal to the soul.
was the way to electrify.
The men.
And so he was able to do that. And some people who he was against, Duke of Wellington, the British general, being the classic example, who won the Battle of Waterloo against him, who wasn't interested in it.
electrifying the soul of the men at all. He he rather despised his ordinary soldiers. But nonetheless You're talking about Wellington or the Duke of Wellington, he had some sort of choice negative remarks about his uh about his own soldiers. And he was a rather sort of stuffy aristocrat. But they loved him because
He cared about how many of them died in battle, you know, and he never lost the battle as as well, which is a very um useful thing in a commander, needless to say, but he didn't win. He didn't go out. He th he would think it beneath him to go out and try to inspire the men.
Whereas
Napoleon.
his choice of hat and his grey coat and his way of uh taking off medal his own medals and giving them to soldiers on the battlefield and his orders of the day, his proclamations
before the battle of the pyramids in seventeen ninety nine, he said, Forty centuries look down upon you.
This is an extraordinary thing for a soldier, you know, in Egypt far away from home. He looks up at the pyramids and thinks yeah, I'm he's placing the events of that day in the long historical
Rapid up.
And Churchill did that too, by the way, of course, to a great degree. You in about ten percent of all of the speeches that Churchill gave in nineteen forty, there's some reference to history or the past.
he too would summon up the idea
that yes, Britain is on its own, Britain and the British Commonwealth are on their own
And this of course was in the period before America and Russia were in the war, but we've been in terrible straights before look at Sir Francis Drake, look at Admiral Nelson.
And so on. And we came through those and one.

So yes, he too.
drew on history, and people knew that because he'd written history books and written
Biographies.
including the biography of his great ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough, who was
with Wellington the best soldier that Britain ever produced. People trusted his view of history.
So
Instead of just biographies, I'd like to ask about an autobiography. It's my impression that you recommend that young people read My Early Life.
Yeah. And that there are life lessons contained.
Within it.
Yeah.
Perhaps might help young people. What types of good advice or life lessons
Can people expect to find it?
Network.
Or isn't it does anything stand out to you?
Oh yes, well loads of them. I mean resilience is the classic one. Although he doesn't go in this book into criticising his parents.
Even between the lines.
Churchill was tremendously resilient because his father despised him and his mother ignored him.
Essentially.
But in the actual book itself, he talks about how wonderful it is to be young. Twenty to twenty five, those are the years he says people will forgive you for mistakes you make in that period. It's not until you're thirty that people judge you on what you've achieved rather than your promise. And so on. So it's a it's a he writes about his time, his escape from prison.
For example, which
Let's face it, there is no young man or woman who hasn't at some stage dreamt about the idea of a successful prisoner escape. He took part in the last great cavalry charge of the British
Empire and so he writes about what it's like to charge in with lances in uh he himself had a pistol.
in the Great Cavalry Charge. You know, these are it's just the most exciting book.
And it draws you along.
with life lessons that are very um good, I think, even for today at a time when you're
frankly, unlikely to have to escape from prison or get take part in a cavalry charge.

Oh.
It'll just be very unsuccessful at attempting to escape prison. Modern lockdown. I I can't let this go. It's sticking in my mind the core strategy. I'm not sure strategy is the right modifier for that, but that Napoleon used. It seems like that was waiting to be used.
But it took him to be in the position, of course, of Emperor of France whereby he could impose it. But equally there are other things like the Code Napoleon that were not really waiting to be used. He had to
sort of work them up into a body of laws that uh completely revolutionized uh France. Now when he took the
writing from thirty years prior and applied it.
Is it the position that enabled him to do it, or did he think about
risk differently than other people. And that is
Part of what allowed him to
Implement it.
He'd taken huge risks. He was twenty six years old, and according to the the Churchill view of life, you know, you can take risks when you're twenty six years old, because people will forgive you. Actually, the French Revolution um government would not have forgiven Napoleon if he'd lost the army of Italy in seventeen ninety six. But nonetheless, he was a
A huge risk taker.
He would attack when
normal generals would have fallen back. He was very lucky in that he was fighting
He was twenty six, he was fighting generals who were Austrian generals who were in their seventies.

He used to hit the hinge
of enemy forces. If you have
in an Austrian Sardinian army, for example, he would hit the point between the Austrians and the Sardinians, pushing them both back along their own supply lines and and so on. He used uh psychology a great deal, trying to get into the minds of the generals he was opposed to. He was a great chooser of uh lieutenants of
divisional commanders and people who uh he felt he could trust.
Superb sense of timing.
as well in a battle. He was, um, as I say, he the the sort of exemplar of so many
I've been
Leadership troops.
Do you think he would have viewed
His decisions from the outside that look risky as risky.
If someone takes
sort of uncalculated risks over and over again, then you could call them reckless, but at least a face value that's not maybe the
adjective I would use. So just Yeah but they came off. This is the thing in in the Italian campaign, this first great campaign of his
He hardly lost a battle. He fought fought no.
twenty.
And sort of one nineteen of them. So
If you do that, even though you have taken risks, it's a sort of force multiplier in a sense. You
wind up thinking that they aren't as risky. He did believe in luck.
Which is very important, you know, he famously said that he wanted his marshals to be lucky.
And he would promote people if he thought they were lucky.
And that of course is a I mean it's runs against everything that we twenty first century rationalists.
Can possibly believe in, but you know.
It it worked for me. Yeah, seems to have worked.
Until it didn't. Until it doesn't. Of course. Until it doesn't. Yeah. So
Promoted the decision. Promoted the unlucky guy. The the decision in eighteen twelve to march on Moscow was
Hugely risky and of course it didn't pay off. Is it true that you have a signed letter
From Aldous Huxley. I do. Alright, now Aldus Huxley, I believe. Aldous. You know, I've realized the longer I spend in England, I really need to I think I should take
TOEFL classes. Test of English is a foreign language. Need to brush up on the mother tongue, as it were.
Uh
He died if I'm not
Wrong the year you were born.
I think it was. Why do you have that letter? And what does the letter say?
The letter actually was written from Los Angeles, where he was living in the nineteen fifties.
It was in nineteen fifty nine.
And somebody just wrote to him asking for his autograph.
And obviously also asked I don't have the letter from the autograph hunter, but he obvious for some sort of
Deep meaningful thought.
And the deep and meaningful thought is
that Huxley gave him.
And I'm a huge admirer of Huxley, I listen Gaza and
Obviously uh Brave New Worlds and so on are uh wonderful works.
And he said in this letter that men do not learn
much from the lessons of history.
is one of the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach us.
That is so true, isn't it?
book that I've written, I've written twenty books, there's not a book that I've written when I haven't looked across at that frame letter in my study and thought.
Wow, that is just so perceptive.
So I have a question about the uh subtitle.
of your by Ruffe on Churchill, which I believe is walking with destiny.
You mentioned this holy fire, I think is the term you used earlier.
But do many of the leaders you've studied have this
Belief
And I may not be wording this the best way, but of being chosen by destiny in some
Fashion.
The phrase comes from his remark in the last
chapter or the last few pages of his
war memoirs, the first volume of his war memoirs, The Gathering Storm, wonderful book.

And he's referring to the day that he became Prime Minister, the day he was appointed by the King as Prime Minister, which happened to be
coincidentally as it turned out, because Hitler didn't know he was going to become prime minister.
On the same day that Hitler invaded in the West.
Invaded Belgium and Luxembourg and Holland.
Shortly afterwards, of course, to invade France.
And he said I
Felt as if I were walking with destiny and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour.
And for this trial.
and he had a profound sense of personal destiny.
Now you and I might think
as twenty first century rationalists, that this is a bit sort of mad to uh think that you're preordained to save, in this case, Britain and civilization. If you said that to me, that that was your
belief about yourself, I would think that you were clinically insane. But enough things had happened to Churchill in his life. He had had so many close brushes with death,

It's not insane to think that, but it's not by any means just and Napoleon also felt that he had a star to guide him, and he had the luck that we spoke about earlier, but that luck was
who was a woman in his case, was somebody he needed to woo and to try to seduce.
And of course i in eighteen twelve she turns her back on him and and he speaks of her in that
sense. Which is also a pretty, you know, insane way to look at life, isn't it? But they were both, as I mentioned earlier, devotees of the ancients, of Caesar and
Alexander the Great, both of whom also of course had this
driving sense of personal destiny. And so it does
Existing people.
If you could I'll give you two options. Stand in.
Meaning take the place of one of the people you've studied in depth.

Or just simply witness them.
In a given
moment or day or period in their lives.
What might you choose?
Well, first of all, I wouldn't want to stand in their place at all. I know that I don't have the intestinal fortitude of these extraordinary people.
But it would be it would it be the day that I just mentioned. It would be the tenth of May nineteen forty, the day that Hitler's invading.
the cabinet meets and recognises that Neville Chamberlain is not the man to
continue on the war now that it's turned to the West. And the meetings that took place the previous day and that day
Where by
Neville Chamberlain.
Ghost of the King and suggest Churchill.
And the King wasn't terribly excited about Churchill either, because they'd fallen out over the abdication crisis and he thought Churchill was a bit of a loose canon. But nonetheless he's willing to call Churchill. Churchill then goes to
Buckingham Palace and becomes Prime Minister.
and comes back and starts to organise his government as the news is coming in of
the German success and victories in the
On the Western front. I mean this is
What a day. What a day in history that must have been. So if I could be a
fly on the wall, any day in history, that's the day that I would choose.
Can we just go back though to this
concept of
of a sense of destiny because of course of course it isn't
Just
great men as in
good men, positive forces in history that has this. Adolf Hitler also
had a sense of destiny, when he w and Providence and luck and being watched over by bigger forces and so on. When he uh survived his assassination attempt on the twentieth of july nineteen forty four, when um you remember Staufenberg moves the briefcase with a bomb in it to a point in the table that
just shreds Hitler's trousers when it goes off and doesn't glimpse. He also
put it down to Providence that he had been uh allowed to survive and therefore to stay in charge and
the Fuhrer was going to save the fatherlands and the th and the Reich. So it's not something I don't want your um
viewers and listeners to come away thinking that
it's a really good thing to think that you know you're being watched over by a a more powerful force who's saving you to become the um world saving figure. You can cut a lot of different ways. I think David David Kuresh and cult leaders and
Exactly that Jeff Jones down in Ghana or wherever he was. All of these all of these um frauds and crooks and con men use it as well.

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Are there
Any particular weaknesses or pathologies or failures that come to mind in, say, Churchill and Napoleon or others who help to make them ultimately
Great in the ways that they were great.
Oh, definitely. Definitely. The key thing is learning from mistakes.
which not all politicians do, I need uh uh scarcely point out.
But Churchill certainly did. He made mistake after mistake. He got
Female suffrage wrong.
The application crisis that I mentioned earlier.
He joined the gold standard at the wrong time at the wrong
Level.
The black and tans in Ireland was a disaster. Primarily, of course, the
Dells and Els crisis of nineteen fifteen to early nineteen sixteen, where
over a hundred thousand Allied troops were killed wounded or captured. I mean this was a a series of mistakes.
In every single one of them in
He learned.
From those mistakes. How did he do that?
I like b
Because there's there's probably
I would think maybe some method behind the madness, maybe it's just more self awareness or reflection, but did he have a process for learning?
He wasn't hubristic.
That was the
key thing. I think it probably helps also, of course, to do it in a democratic system, unlike Napoleon or Hitler, whereby, you know, he was criticised the entire time in the House of Commons for all of those things. He had to defend them and therefore had to in a logical and rational point.
I mean democracy works very well at at pricking the pomposity and tubris of
people if it's working properly. And Napoleon also learnt from mistakes.
in his military career. And I don't
believe that the decision to march on Moscow itself was
Hebristic. I'm
Slightly aside from
a lot of military historians about this.
But just to explain.
He'd beaten the Russians twice before.
He
had an army twice the size of the Russians. He knew perfectly well that the winter was going to come, but he stayed too long in
Moscow, but if he'd gone to Moscow and then come back again immediately, he would uh not have had the
climactic disasters that overcame in with the blizzards in the October and November of
eighteen twelve. And so you have this sense that yes, it was a appalling strategic
Era.
But it wasn't done out of a drive to the because he thought he was a sort of demigod. That I think is a misunderstanding of his personality.
So I'm gonna ask
Something that Neil Ferguson.
Yeah.
Of class on the shelf.
Put in an email. I would ask Andrew about the diary he keeps, which is a source of intense anxiety. Which is a source of intense anxiety to all of his friends and even more to his enemies.
Best wishes, Neil. Neil Neil doesn't care about any of that. He's only cares about what I say about him. He's the
He is the friend. He is the friend who is obsessed with the diary. Yes. I I keep a diary, for God's sake. It's is it such a is it such a crime. We went on the skiing holiday um uh this year and it's all he talked about. He's obsessed.
Um the forbidden fruit. I mean what is what is the story here?
I think he's kicking himself that he didn't keep on. You know, you think of all these extraordinary people he meets, you know, every time I see him, he's just been talking to President G or Bibi um Netanyahu, or, you know, President of America. And he doesn't write down um uh keep it all in the diary. So I think there's an element of envy going on here, frankly.
But I find it very
Relaxing and
Calming.
to think that
My life isn't
Just going to
Be a complete waste of time.
And one of the only ways that I can see that. Thank you. Well that's kind of you. Thank you. Um one of the only ways that I can uh I can justify this concept
that it's all not just a sort of, you know, nihilistic sort of mail straw boom doggle exactly. Is by um writing books, obviously, which I hope will survive me, but also noting down what I've done in the day. But
Neil is convinced that
That every time he says anything embarrassing or or something, I'm gonna be loading the app into your diary. Exactly. And that when we're sort of eighty, he's going to he's gonna go to the bookshop, buy the diary, flick to Ferguson comma Neil, and see sort of um 40 entries, each of which is gonna make his
Face getting charges. Exactly. But which it's it's not gonna be like that at all. What he's actually going to do is to immediately go to the diary and and look up Ferguson Neal, but
See all the amusing, charming, intelligent remarks he's made, the witticisms, you know, and all that kind of thing. And not just him, obviously everybody that I've ever met over the last
Forty plus years. And how do you
So you're you're on your metal now. You're gonna have to say went on to be very stressed behavior. Exactly. What an idiot. Note to self send chocolates to Andrew. Don't forget his birthday.
Neither many.
Many people who keep a diary.
How do you keep your diet? Is it a nightly exercise? Is it typed out? You mustn't do it nightly because
Or at least you you might be able to, but I drink.
And so uh I like drinking. Yeah. And so there's nothing worse than trying to write if you've been drinking also
writing down the witchesms sometimes there's a bit of a problem to the fact that I can't read my writing the next morning. But no, it has to be done pretty much the next morning. You can't leave it for two weeks or so. Do you do it to happen with what's your frequency? I used to w I
Every day. I used to write it Oh no, if but if nothing interesting has happened, then I won't put anything down. Nothing to report. Yeah, no, but like Louis the uh sixteenth on the fourteenth of july seventeen eighty nine, the day of the fall of the Bastille, all he writes is rien.
Nothing.
So I hope I'm not gonna be quite as moronic as that. It's not really intended for publication, which is another thing that Neil doesn't have to be. He's gonna latch onto that but really part of that sentence. He's gonna be like You see? You see? Yeah, yeah. No. Of course he is. But nonetheless, I do find it uh
Well, you mentioned earlier about how many words I write. It's never more than that.
Five hundred words maximum.
And it picks the most interesting part of the day and if somebody has has
Said or done something interesting, I'll I'll stick it in.
Do you do that before your book writing? Let's say you're on first thing in the morning. All right. And is that just like pajama, slippers, and a cup of coffee, or
Yeah, precisely that. Yeah, exactly.
And do you take
This seems like such a
Ridiculous question, but
How do you think about taking breaks when you're writing?
I mean, obviously you might have a bathroom brake or something like that. Do you build in breaks? Do you ride the flow as long as you have it? What does it look
The flow as long as you have it. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because in because it might not come back.
If you deliberately um
I mean, sometimes.
And I'm slightly loath to admit this in public, but um nonetheless, sometimes if you are really flowing
I can go without.
Yeah.
washing for three days. I can be in my dressing gown and and slippers. My wife finds it extremely unhygienic and I'm not allowed to sleep in the same bed. But I will if I'm running
you know, hard at a really difficult chapter and I need to keep my
Thoughts in order.
I will not waste time doing anything. I'll I'll get some breakfast, you know, and so on, but that will just be
A dash.
to the kitchen and back again. Because you've got to get
If something's complicated.
And there are lots of occasions not a classic as well, we go back to the tenth of may nineteen forty. That in my Churchill book, you have to get it right because every minute
Not just every hour, every minute something is happening.
they're getting news from w what the Love Lovers attacking and he's then having to create his government. He then goes off to the House of Commons and so on. It's just relentless. And unless you
Encapsulating your mind successfully.
What?
is important.
about that day, you'll never get it over to the reader. And if you're constantly going off and
going for a walk or going to the gym or showering or whatever, there's a danger that you're going to fall out of the rhythm of creativity.
How do you think about that flow when you have the flow? I mean there is I hasten to add is never more than three days I've ever gone without a shower. I wouldn't judge. I I was just on a hiking trip. I went I went ten days without showering, so I don't judge. I won't throw stuns in my glass house. Only when I'm right.
The book. I hasten to add that as well. Go up. I don't want people to know to hold their nose and go, hello, Andrew. How do you think about that flow with writing? So there's there's one reason not to interrupt the writing if you have a hard task ahead of you.
And you have
47 balls in the air. And if you drop them, you're gonna have to start the juggling process all over and the boot up sequence takes a long time.
Uh, how do you think about the
flow of writing or
that feeling that things are coming to you more easily or moving onto the page more easily.
Sometimes it's a very bad thing, of course. Uh Doctor Johnson did say
When you have written your most brilliant
purple paragraph.
read it again and rip it up. So no, you must tell me more about that. Oh yeah. No. Well if you think
that you've just written something completely brilliant, there's a very good chance that it's rubbish. It has to be somebody else, it has to be your publisher or someone, some other person who can read it and have a completely objective eye.
Because there's a very good chance that you're hugging yourself with glee about something that actually you think sounds wonderful, but in fact is complete It's completely. And I write that down. Give it your customary five percent, that's fine.
If you had to choose, uh maybe you'd want to choose from your darlings here, but
If this question has an answer, you don't even need to name them, but you keep a person in mind. If you had to choose one person
to act as your proofreader for your work to be that sanity check. No, he's called Stuart Prophet, he's the most brilliant
up a show in in London. He's known
By everybody to be the most brilliant. He's also the most irritating. Make sense to me.
Heasant. Um he oh my
God, for my Napoleon book. He's gonna listen to this, so I I'm gonna have to be as nice as possible, but oh my he's good, he's Professor Perfect is my nickname for it. Cause he's a total professorial kind of figure.
And for my Napoleon book, I remember
A series of
Marginalia. And again, this is the thing where you think you've done something rather good, you know.
And he writes the
I don't think Z Rex in the Magna.
Are you sure this joke is funny?
Nothing more crushing than than to have that. He also wrote question mark, you know. And you and you read it again and you chortle to yourself and you're going yes it is
He wrote.
There were a whole series of them.
In the Well, we were talking earlier about the seventeen ninety six campaign of Napoleon.
He said, How wide was the river Poe in seventeen ninety six? There was another one, did Napoleon take Herodotus to Egypt?
She's like.
Damn, I don't know. I'm gonna have to find out, you know. He's a genius, but also a very irritating person. Could you say more about what makes him so good? I'll buy some time just by saying if I can't find
a writer friend of mine, let's just say, or an editor who can proofread my work, I'll very often give and I write particular type of thing, but I would give my
Chapter, let's just say, to a friend who's a really good lawyer.
And part of the reason for that is that they're very good at
trimming out excess. And if anything is ambiguous, they're green. Or contradictory. They're very good at surgically excising that.
Uh what makes this particular gentleman what was his name again? Stuart? Stuart Profit.
Uh, great man. What makes Stuart
So good.
at giving feedback. What how does does he see things differently?
He's a
profoundly
Committed.
to history.
He loves history.
So
He has a sort of higher to try to to flo the world with great history books, which is as far as I'm concerned, the greatest purpose that you can have. I mean it doesn't get better than that. He has a very logical brain
He's
very good on uh syntax. So anything that doesn't sound right
In a sentence he will
Point out.
Sometimes to have seen right from a poetic perspective. From a poetic perspective. Yeah. If there's a
rhythm that isn't right, or if something rhymes as well. Sometimes you can use two words that have a a rhyme in them and he will cut that automatically because it just
Doesn't feel right.
actually disagree with him. I did on the joke, by the way. And and whenever anybody tells that that particular joke is funny, I um thought it too I thought it too. I guess I ping the email straight on to uh to still of course I do. I'd be mad not to, wouldn't I
But no, there's a I mean, and he's been doing it for forty years, so and he's at the top of his trade. So you would expect him to be really good, but boy is he.
So those two examples you gave, the With of the River and Herodotus. Why did he ask those two?
Um, because he is always trying to put himself into the mind of the reader and wondering what the reader would be thinking. And he
thought, rightly or wrong in this case, that the reader would be interested in the width of the river and
And whether or not Herodotus went with him.
There are loads more examples like that. You know, I will send him a hundred pages and he'll send me back a hundred
pages of questions and criticisms and remarks. I almost sometimes think that I ought to put his name on the front cover of the book. He phoned me up actually about the Napoleon book.
And the original of N Napoleon.
just had a huge N on it and lots of Bs. And he said, uh he phone me up and he said, I'm gonna I've
Got this idea for the front cover of the book.
Your name isn't gonna be on it. And he said, And neither is Napoleon And I thought over the phone I thought
Okay, he's finally gone completely crack. Yeah, exactly. That's right. Poor man, how long can he stay in the in his job if he's gonna come up with ideas. We can fake it for a while. Yeah, exactly, but it can't be long now, you know, before
And it turned out to be totally brilliant concept because if you see a gigantic N with B's, you think of Napoleon, you know, and that's what uh Bs as um
Absolutely an idiot. Bees, like honeybees. Honeybees, yeah. That that was his symbol, it was Napoleon's symbol. Because they could sting, but they could also give honey, you know that's the idea. And it just captured people's imagination and sold an awful lot of copies, which was really great. That sold half a million copies, that book now. That's incredible. Yeah.
That is incredible. Sounds like such a gift to have a steward. I need a steward.
Yeah, everyone needs to do that. Everyone needs to take mine, but I don't uh I don't I think
Think he m might find he might spend his entire
first month on just the syntax errors in my first chapter, so
You do want to strangle him, by the way, though.
This is the sign of a very good proofreader.
Why do you think it is that some historical figures take on
These mythic proportions where some who have huge impacts seem to
sort of fall into obscurity.
over time. Are there particular characteristics? Is it
self made in a sense where people create that myth of themselves while they're still alive.
How do you think about that?
I haven't thought about that before. That's a really good question. I think that
Bit like there are some things that are very difficult to get over
To people.
on the printed page.
Charisma.
Is one of them. Chalm.
Is another one.
Sexiness.
These are things that we all know from our own lives matter enormously. If somebody's charismatic, charming, and sexy, you're going to want to be interested in them, follow them much more than somebody who isn't. And yet explaining
how they are.
Any of those things.
Very famously hard to explain.
And I think the same is true with historical characters.
How can it be that this unprepossessing
Looking at
American president who happens to with his strange beard but not mustache, who happens to be uh president at the time that the country is falling apart.
manages to save the country through this terrible see it through this terrible civil war, and then is assassinated right at the end of the civil war. I mean the story is so extraordinary, isn't it? And yet to
Explain the charisma and charm, not sexiness. I don't think it's Lincoln's case, but that you know many of your business or readers might disagree with me, but nonetheless.
Just imagining him popping up on a dating app. Exactly. My ride a fixed gear bike, make expensive cappuccinos. That's kinda the hipster look. Anyway, I digress. Yeah.
It is difficult to explain how some people
Just
grab the headlines and others don't. I mean, of course it does help to be a leader in a war.
That's true of of of Lincoln and Churchill and Ponian and so on. The chance of
becoming a world historical figure if you are
Prime Minister of Luxembourg in a time of peace.
is gonna be much more difficult, of course.
But
Yeah, there doesn't seem to be a uh hard and fast rule, does that?
Hard and fast recipe that I can follow.
I'm scared. Well don't take us to war on the back of you wanting to be medical capable.
Certainly not eager.
Makes me think of, oh, what is the title of that poem?
Azie Mandy is.
Look upon my works in despair, ah.

I'll leave that alone.
I met a traveller from an antique land who said two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert.
Near them on the sand, half shrunk, a shattered visage lies.
Whose wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tells that its sculpture well those passions read, which yet survive.
My name is Ozzy Mandias, King of Kings, look upon my works, ye mighty in despair. Nothing besides remains round that eternal wreck.
Long and bare the lone and level sand stretch far away.
Hot damn. There you go, listeners.
Can you point out to the distance that uh you didn't tell me that this was gonna happen? I did not send a memo in advance.
And I suppose the preface to that is that there are these ruins
sticking out of the sands. The feet. Yeah, the feet. The trunks of the legs. So there was obviously a huge, magnificent kind of, you know
Pyramid high
glorious statue to Ozzy Mandias.
And now there's nothing.
And it goes back to what I was saying earlier about not being remembered.
Did you remember the now I'm gonna I'm not I feel like I'm s cross ex not cross examining but asking too much, but who is the author of that of that poem? Jesse Beschelli. I saw the
one of maybe the original or first certainly a first draft
in Oxford because I was going through a program at Wadham College and there's an exhibit on right now, which is something like
Cut paste rewrite and it shows the
hand edited works of Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and
All these others and I came across that.
If anybody wants to see a first edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, it's just gone on
exhibition at the um I was there this morning Lambeth Palace Library. There's a thing called Her Book. It's about female
early female writers. It's a brilliant exhibition.
And so if there's anyone in London who's
interested in seeing that book. It's it's there today.
Beautiful. And if you're near Oxford, Weston Library has the exhibit that I was mentioning. A lot of gems. A lot of gems. You have some really fun old stuff in the UK, it turns out. Thank you. Uh I'm not gonna take that person. No, no, no. That's a compliment.
Yeah, ol old in the US is like nineteen seventy, you know, it's smaller. I thought you're talking about me. Oh no. Not you. How do you think about
Legacy.
Because I
Along the lines of Ania the Ozzy Mandias.
Peace I'm like.
Is it just sort of hubris to believe in the first place that that's something worth aspiring to, having something last and stand the test of time? I mean, how do you how do you personally think about this? Well Especially as someone who studies history. Yes. And
I obviously do want people to read my books long after I died.
Now, I'm not going to know whether they are or not, so
Why on earth? It just seems so illogical to even think that, doesn't it? That it should matter.
to me that anything happens the second after I've died.
But I know that I do, and it is one of the drives.
for being a
Writer because words
Always live forever.
Then they're virtually the only thing that um does. Ozzy Mandias' statue is just two trunkless legs of stone. Whereas actually his words, you know, uh look upon my works you mighty in despair, that
goes to the heart of the human condition.
And Shelley's poetry still survives in a way that Ozzy Mandias' statue doesn't. So there is something about
words that are immortal and we're all
sort of grasping for immortality in one way or another. Yeah.
It is true.
Do you read
Fiction.
Yes, yes I do.
When I go on holiday, which is us usually hiking actually with my wife, she loves going to
Places that
involve mountains.
And in order to get history
completely out of my system for the two weeks or so that we're making. I do read fiction.

Wanna completely clear my brain, I'll have a
detective novel. And I've chosen the most complicated of all of the detective novelists, chapter called Robert Goddard. Have you ever heard of Robert Goddard? I have not. So complicated the to work out who done it or what groups of people done it. It's very rarely just one person and why. And
I try and make notes in the back of the book, connecting each person to everybody else. And it so by the end of it it looks like one of those really complicated sort of management or hundreds of people con connecting to to everybody else.
to try and work out who done it and he always, always beats me.

Yeah, that sounds fun. Yeah, I uh been getting. As far as sort of high culture um
Writing is those concerns.
I will occasionally do that. I'm president of the
Cliveton Literary Festival.
And so we have lots of novelists come to that. And so if you've got William Boyd or Salman Rushdie or somebody who you know you're gonna be bumping into at the festival, it's always a good idea to read their latest novel. We had Robert Harris uh recently, and so that's always well worth doing. And then there are a few w writers like Michelle Wellbeck who
Is
Just s so great that
You have to sort of
Read whatever he's

Uh I don't recognise the name I'm very
Hellebeck.
And he's a the genius very controversial and quite unpopular and uh in France. And the latest one I'm reading is where it features his own murder.
Ha ha
It's a great satire. It's very, very funny. Is there a book you might suggest starting with? Uh The Map and the Territory.
The map of the territory. The map and the territory of Michelle Elbec.
The name starts H E L L
B. And um
Yeah, it's a sort of satire on French.
intellectual customs and uh and I can see them loving that. It's very funny. It's very funny. Why is he controversial?
Oh, because he's been deeply politically incorrect as well. He just he just doesn't care. He just
Doesn't
care what he what he writes. He's a honey badger in that sense. Do you know what I mean? I do, I do, I do. He he's a he's a literary honey badger as well, Beck.
Ha
All right, so speaking of politically incorrect.
How should we
In your mind.
Write about imperial history.
We should try as far as possible.
Two
be genuinely objective.
We shouldn't take the assumption
that all white people whenever they went abroad did so solely in order to rape, murder, massacre and exploit.
Because certainly in the latter parts, we were talking earlier about actually about Winston Churchill and the
and no bless oblige the concept that it was part of your duty person to try to
make the world a better place for other less privileged people. And that was, especially in the
Last part of the
British Empire.
a driving force for a lot of people, especially obviously missionaries and Christians, but also
other people, explorers and people who were involved in agriculture and and so on, you know, they they actually were not
driven by rapacity and greed in the way that
Essentially the Marxist analysis of
imperialism has made out.
So be be objective. Some of those people were like that. Undoubtedly, of course they were. You know, especially
Some of the
people in southern Africa and uh and elsewhere. But for a long period of the
Story of the British Empire.
For much of that empire.
It actually was a force for human good rather than evil.
What do you see as the
Challenges moving forward.
For
the capturing of history and or how do you see it changing?
As we move forward.
I am quite worried about it in um
Britain because
First of all, fewer and fewer people seem to be taking it as a subject at a university level.
Secondly we have this thing, it's nicknamed Henry to Hitler.
where we jump from the Tudors
to the second world war, and we don't do the very important intervening stages of the Stuarts, the Civil War, the Hanoverians, loss of America, the really anything up to the outbreak of the First World War.
And there's so much of really important history in that period that we seem to jump from one to the next they're saying
survey quite recently of
But she's
teenagers. Quite a big survey, you know, over a thousand of them.
And twenty percent of them thought it's like twenty three percent of them thought that the American war of independence was won by
Denzel Washington.
You know, the Americans get a bad rap. It's not just us.
And also there were twenty percent of there were twenty percent of these kids, these are British school kids, who also thought that Winston Churchill was a fictional character and that Sherlock Holmes and and Eleanor Rigby were real people. So whatever's going on in in you know British history teaching, I think there's there's still a lot to be desired.
If you had never been able to write any books.
In that alternate reality, yeah.
What have you personally or what would you have gained personally from studying history?
It's a lot of things, isn't it, history? It's a it can be a bit of a quick sand.
In what sense?
Well, as soon as you think you understand
A period.
All it takes is
one new set of
Papers.
Or a new book written by
somebody else, of the friends especially, that can make you look again at the same
Period.
And completely um change your mind about it.
And that's a little unnerving at the age of sixty one, I have to say. I'm just reading Ronald Hutton's second volume of his life of
Oliver Cromwell, which has just been published. And I'd always thought of Cromwell.
as somebody who had a
set of principles that he moulded
his time's a around in order to see
True.
And Ronald Hutton has completely exploded that thesis for me.
And I realised that he was, like most politicians, just sort of grabbing the the coattails of history and hanging on as much as he could. And um yes, he was a good soldier and so on, but he was in terms of his politics, he was
Constantly trying to create.
Um alliances, of course, like all politicians do.
And when opportunities came he grabbed them, but he was at the mercy of events much more than creating them.
whereas I had for years had the sort of image of or of Cromwell like that statue outside Parliament of this incredibly uh
It's a solid figure.
He wasn't like that at all.
What are other things that attract you?
Or attracted you.
To history.
It wasn't just Christopher Perry, my dad read history at Oxford.
And he used to take me around uh castles. We go on holiday to, you know, Wales and see the great Edward the First castles. And he would chat to on journeys, we'd chat about history and what ifs, you know, the counterfactuals and things like that. And so I grew up feeling very
comfortable with it. And
And recognising that it's a beautiful and fascinating thing, you know. Whereas I think sometimes
Some people can be
Not scared of history, but
They can be put off.
um history because they weren't taught it very well at school, or they just thought it was a succession of dates, or they can't see any relevance to their daily lives and so on. And I've never been one of those people.
So if you were doing a
Presentation. Could be anywhere.
Yeah.
On
Why people
Aside from conflating, you know, Denzel Washington with other historical figures, why they should
Read history or engage with history.
What would the the thrust of the
Presentation B.
I suppose it does come back.
to that all the Huxley quotes, you know, about trying to learn some of the lessons. There's a marvellous moment when
In nineteen fifty three, June nineteen fifty three, at the time of the
Late Queen's Coronation. Winston Churchill is walking across Westminster Hall, this fabulous great hall that was when it was built in the
Late thirteenth century the largest room in Europe.
And it's fused with history. It's where
Of course, where Churchill himself was to be
to Lion State, but also where the monarchs lie in state, where
Warren Hastings went on trial and
Charles I went on trial, and
People like uh Mandela and Zelensky have given speeches and things like that. It's you it's compounded. Thomas Moore went on trial there, the Earl of Stratford.
I just mentioned a whole load of people who were all decapitated, actually, as I know William Wallace as well, he was decapitated as well. And so you've got this sense of all of British history, you know, sums up in a room, essentially. And a young American student stops Churchill.
And asks essentially for s a piece of life advice.
and Churchill replies, Study history, study history.
For therein lies all the secrets of statecraft.
And that would be one of the reasons that I would tell people, you know, that if you want to understand what's going on in the world,
You do have to look and see what has happened before. And there's no person who doesn't want to have a better understanding of what's going on in the world or try to work out for themselves.
the great uh forces in in our
planet today. So that I suppose would be the answer. That's why I've chosen study history as my as my motto of my coat of arms, uh, for example, and why I I've got a podcast too, and I call it Secrets of Statecraft.
I think that's a sort of motivating factor.
Secrets of Statecraft, that is it's the Hither Institutions podcast, but it's great fun to do.
Must have Neil Ferguson on at some stage and um I can tease him about not keeping a diary.

What is statecraft?
I I think I know, but I want to very often I think I know something and it is in fact not true at all. So
It's the ability to run a country.
So you've got to
juggle the diplomatic, the military, the economic, the cultural, all of these things, the religious, all of these things together to create of the kind of
country that you want it to be, and that is statecraft. And so it's been going on as long as human history has and always will.
Looking forward. Let's see if
Studied.
Many great figures.
From history.
You've looked at these different chapters of
Including your late king, your last king, George the Third. I wrote a biography of him a few years ago, which was great fun to do. Yeah. Sorry, carry on. Oh no, that's all right. I was just going to ask you looking forward, given how much you've reflected backwards.
Where do you think things are going for
the UK and or for the US. Like if if you were a betting man when you say, hmm.
It's a c there's a good chance, it's not a certainty, but
Things can if the dominoes continue to fall the way they're falling.
A B or C.
I'm afraid I'm a bit of a pessimist. Yeah. Yeah.
Not so much for the United States because you're still such a
Rich and innovative country.
But
I'm wondering in
Britain.
Whether or not and history
He's a an important part of this, especially the way in which history is
used politically.
To wonder whether or not
we still believe in ourselves, certainly in the way that we did when I was growing up.
In twenty I'm gonna try and get the
Statistics right. I think it's twenty fifteen.
As recent as twenty fifteen.
Maybe it's twenty ten.
eighty.
Six percent of people
We're proud of British history.
That has now fallen down to fifty six percent.
And I'm sure that the reason for this is
the sustained attack on
Well the British Empire that we were discussing earlier.
And people
uh forgetting the part that we played in the abolition of slavery and concentrating just on the on the horrors and the and the monstrous things that happened.
And we uh therefore
If you're not proud of your past, you're not proud of your amb ancestors, you're not proud of the things that they produced, and Britain has produced some pretty extraordinary and wonderful things for the world, then
It's difficult to see
why anyone would want to be proud of the future of the country as well. And so
I'm pretty pessimistic. And when I feel pessimism for America, it's for
Things like taking Thomas Jefferson's statue down from the New York
City Hall.
Yeah.
And it's a form of cultural suicide, it strikes me not to
Admire the founders of your nation. And yes, of course, um he owned slaves, but he also wrote a constitution that
that has survived for a quarter of a millennium.
And he was brave enough, and Washington and all the um the others brave enough to stand up against
the most powerful empire in the world.
I think these things.
You deserve your statue, it seems to me, and if you
Here I'm pulling these things down.
I think you're raking a
kind of living link with the past that
makes you a great country.
And that's certainly happening in this country as well.
I mean, I'm a bit of a pessimist anyway, because I'm a Tory. And pessimism is an essential part of Toryism. Um not as big a pessimist, I hasten to add as Neil Ferguson. Who who I like to say it's never terribly difficult to tell the it's a quote from P. G. Woodhouse, never terribly difficult to tell the difference between a ray of sunshine
And a Scotsman with a grievance. And and Neil always tells you that it's all doom and gloom and everything's gonna be uh utterly disastrous. I wonder whether or not he truly believes it because he's actually himself a very, you know, upbeat and personally uh sort of positive individual who does
lots of things that imply that actually he does think the world's gonna get better. But boy, oh boy How do you personally if you do, I mean it seems like you
Examine or you have a fascination with counterfactuals, the what ifs.
You read books that have the potential for upending
Sort of long held.
Theses.
Which can be uncomfortable, I would imagine.
Do you have people around you or who you deliberately expose yourself to who
offset perhaps some of your pessimistic tendencies with
forms of optimism that
They can defend.
Oh yes, my wife is the classic example. She's optimistic about the future. She's in business. She's a very successful businesswoman, so she actually sees a lot of the th innovations that are taking place, the drugs that um are coming online that are, you know, saving lives and taking on defeating pain and so on, you know. She's great at
believing in the innate capacity of capitalism to reinvent itself in a positive way for more and more people and
Take people out of poverty and all of those positive things. It's an invigorating to talk about the world with her because
it makes me um much less
sort of e or like.
feel like any other uh inside scoop that that that people should know about Neil what or what is his secret optimistic voice memos that he sends you. You can annotate add to your diary. Please see audio reference forty seven.
Uh well Andrew, this has been great fun. You have many books that people can read, certainly, and they'll all be in the show notes, but the is it most recent conflict?
Yes, that's a book I wrote with uh David Petraeus.
And of course him being a general who's commanded armies of over hundred and sixty thousand in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Has been so fascinating intellectually for me because of course I've a military historian, I've never worn a uniform for one minute. So that was great. We we've got a title for folks, just so they have that, The Evolution of Warfare from Nineteen Forty Five to Ukraine.
Well it's now actually Gaza. The paperback takes us up to um up to Gaza as well, about halfway through that campaign in uh in Gaza.
It was after the
Russian invasion of Ukraine, that I came up with the idea of uh writing the book and I got on to David, who I knew.
And said why don't we write this
As a military history, there are gonna be lots of political histories about this, but just the military side of it.
and put it into the context of all the wars that have happened since nineteen forty five. So we go through not all of them, there are four hundred of them, but all the key ones, you know, the forty or so key ones that that you'll have heard of and
That's
Show how war has
evolved and developed and sometimes it leaps forward and other times it goes into sort of sideshows, but
We went to the publishers and
And they quite understandably said, Well how are you going to divvy up the chapters?
And I said, Well, David's gonna write about all the countries he's invaded.
And I'll and I'll, you know, fill in the rest. And he also did the Vietnam chapter as well, actually. And then we sent hundreds and maybe thousands of emails to one another over the course of the year or so that we were writing it.
That's very fast. It is fast. It is fast. But the thing is you do it so fast. Well, because the situation in Ukraine was moving so quickly. And then the Gaza War broke out on the day of the publication of the Harback.
So that was literally the 7th of October that we were bringing that out. So we then needed to get on with with writing about that as well.
And as you know I
Tinks right quickly.
Yeah. And so does he, you know, he's a soldier scholar. He he read uh he went to your old uh university. He was at Princeton doing a post grad on military history. So he was very much able to, you know, keep
Sending back those emails. Yeah. I suppose he's not lacking discipline. Say that again. Would be my guess. What did you find
were key ingredients to that successful collaboration. What made it work, especially with that type of pressure under deadline.
Well, I think there was I know, there was uh mutual respect, which is very important. I'd never written a book with anybody before. And and I was I'm in the midst of doing that right now, which is part of the reason I'm asking. Yeah, no, well it's a it's slightly nerve wracking, isn't it? Because one can get very sort of proprietorial about um one's work.
But that wasn't the case with David because the insights that he gave about what it was like
to be a commander into wars at the absolute apex of command meant that he could then look back
on wars like the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War.
To
sort of place himself in the position of
Matthew Ridgway, you know, in Korea, for example.
And that was so fascinating that I knew that
Th there was nothing that I could add to that. I I
Just
knew that the combination of the soldier and the historian would produce something that was really intellectually stimulating for me.
And that's, you know, in the end, life is a constant battle against boredom, isn't it? It's a it's a constant rear guard action against um against not being stimulated. Do you think
You will do more collaborations?
How are you thinking about your writing moves? I've got are just going to be
Written by me, I've got Napoleon and his marshals.
about how the Emperor
interacted with his marshals and how the marshals interacted with each other. They fortunately all hated each other, so that's much easier for a historian to write something interesting. And hated each other in very um imaginative ways. The greatest reality TV show I've ever seen. Exactly. Um and then after that I'm doing Disraeli.
And he's an extraordinary
character.
who was a complete outsider as a Jew, of course, didn't go to
one of the British public schools or Oxford and Cambridge, or at any university, and through his own
brilliance and he's a novelist, of course, also. His own
wit. He wound up becoming the most powerful man in the world. Yeah, I look forward to reading that one. Good. Thank you. Which is when it's being public. I hope I hope I'll still be around. We'll see. Been here for a decade. We'll see how it goes.
Andrew, this has been great. I really appreciate you taking the time. People can find you. Correct me if I get any of this wrong, AndrewHeffenroberts.net.
Would that be the main website? That's what I have here. Can't remember, but yes, I hope so. Let's just say that's right. And if it's not, I will I'll put questions in the show notes. And then uh is Twitter or X as it stands now a good place for people to follow you as well?
Yeah, that's uh has things like my podcast and so on. Perfect. So that's
As I have it here, A Roberts underscore Andrew.
Is it good?

Perfect. We'll fact check all of that. But we do have that. Is there anything else that you would like to
Add any requests of my audience, anything at all that you'd like to do. Just thank you so much, Tim, for being on the show. I've really enjoyed it.
Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time. This has really been great.
And for people who are listening, as always, you can find the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast. We will include links to everything we discussed. And also, as always, until next time, just be a little kinder than is necessary.
to others, but also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in.
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