My guest is the distinguished author Andrew Roberts. His book is "Masters and Commanders," and the subject is WWII strategy, starring FDR, Winston Churchill, General George C, Marshall and Field Marshall Alan Brooke.

 * The Cricality of Leadership
 * The Competing Long-Range Objectives of the Western Allies
 * The 2nd Front and its Necessity
 * Whose Strategy Prevailed?
 * Normandy, Calais, or North Africa and Italy?
 * Why Not Berlin for the Westerb Allies?
 *The Reality of Victory

     

                        Andrew Roberts at the FDR Library


Andrew Roberts, who was born in 1963, took a first class honors 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 authorized 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 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 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. 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 and has also been shortlisted for the British Army Military Book Award for 2010.

Roberts is interested in public policy and sits on the boards or advisory councils of a number of think-tanks and pressure groups. He is a Director of the Harry Guggenheim Foundation in New York, a founder member of Jose Maria Aznar’s Friends of Israel Committee, and in 2010 chaired the Hessell-Tiltman Award for Non-Fiction.

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. More information about him can be found in Who's Who. Andrew Robert's and The Advocates on You tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFp6E5Uiki0&feature=related

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