Andrew Roberts: belief

Transcript context

…So why is biography, which is a genre you’ve employed across many of your books and, of course, books that have become overwhelmingly famous, rightly so? Why is that the best medium to understand an era or to understand the impact of the era on the present? Because it focuses the mind. It concentrates on one person. You emotionally connect with that person. You either love him or hate him or her. Of course, I have done some work on writing about women. It’s the great man and woman theory of history, of course. And I do believe in that because I think that although there are enormous historical movements that happen, the decline of magic and the rise of science, the industrialization, and everything, those come about as the result of the deliberate choices made by millions, indeed billions of people. And you can’t look at something like the invasion of Russia we were talking about earlier in 1812, or Churchill’s decision to fight on and not make peace with Hitler in 1940, and not recognize that the individual does play an absolutely central role in some major world-changing decisions. So I think it is intellectually justified to write biography. A lot of Whigs and determinists and Marxists don’t. They think that biography is far too antithetical to determinism. But you know, what are we but our decisions? Man is spirit, as Churchill said. So, I think it stacks up as a reasonable way for me to spend my time. Yeah, indeed. I think that’s a great place to close this conversation. This was absolutely fascinating. And the book, again, I highly recommend it. It was a really thorough and interesting read about recent conflicts with insights from not only one of the best historians in the world, but also somebody who commanded the two most recent campaigns that involved conflict since World War II. So the book is Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine, available at Amazon and fine bookstores everywhere. Andrew, thank you so much.…

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