Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) – Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Fellow Andrew Roberts will host a new Hoover Institution podcast entitled, Secrets of Statecraft, which will explore the impact that the study of history has had on the careers and decision making of preeminent world leaders in the modern age.
Roberts, a world-renowned historian and author of popular best-selling books including Napoleon: A Life, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, and his latest, The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III, will host conversations with globally prominent decision-makers, as well as scholars who have written magisterial biographical works.
“The central theme of my podcast is inspired by a conversation that took place on Coronation Day in June 1953,” Roberts said. “A young American asked Sir Winston Churchill for some life-advice, as he was walking through Westminster Hall. ‘Study history, study history,’ Churchill replied, ‘for therein lie all the secrets of statecraft.’”
Initial guests of Secrets of Statecraft will include General David Petraeus (US Army, Ret.); former secretary of state Henry Kissinger; former British prime minister David Cameron; former Australian prime minister John Howard; former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu; Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo; Colombian president Ivan Duque; Hoover senior fellows and historians Victor Davis Hanson and Niall Ferguson; and author and political satirist Christopher Buckley.
Please click here to access future episodes.
About Andrew Roberts
Andrew Roberts is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Professor Roberts studied modern history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he is an Honorary Senior Scholar. His biography of Winston Churchill’s foreign secretary Lord Halifax, The Holy Fox, was published in 1991 and was followed by Eminent Churchillians; Salisbury: Victorian Titan (which won the Wolfson Prize and the James Stern Silver Pen Award); Napoleon and Wellington; Waterloo: Napoleon’s Last Gamble; A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 (which won the US Intercollegiate Studies Institute Book Award); and Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941–45, (which was shortlisted for the British Army Book Award).
Professor Roberts’ book, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War (2009) won the British Army Book Award and reached number two on the Sunday Times bestseller list, and Napoleon: A Life won the Los Angeles Times Biography Prize, the Grand Prix of the Fondation Napoléon, and became a New York Times bestseller. He won the Bradley Prize in 2016. Churchill: Walking with Destiny, published by Penguin in November 2018, won the Council on Foreign Relations’ Arthur Ross Prize. The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III was published by Viking in November 2021.
Professor Roberts is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Historical Society; a trustee of the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust and of the National Army Museum; chairman of the Lehrman Institute Book Prize; the Lehrman Institute Distinguished Fellow at the New York Historical Society; president of the Cliveden Literary Festival and the History in Prisons Initiative; and a visiting professor of the War Studies Department of King’s College, London. He reviews history books for over a dozen newspapers and periodicals. His website can be found at www.andrew-roberts.net
For coverage opportunities, contact Jeffrey Marschner, 202-760-3187, jmarsch@stanford.edu.
