Andrew Roberts

Andrew Roberts sits in the House of Lords as Lord Roberts of Belgravia

With Europe, but not of it

Dr Felix Klos is an extremely personable, highly intelligent American-Dutch historian who has undertaken much archival research, worked extremely hard and is an excellent writer. In trying to persuade us that Churchill favoured Britain joining a federal Europe, however, he comes up against several immovable obstacles. The most serious of these is that in the

A tough act to follow

Gary Oldman has joined a long list of actors who have portrayed Winston Churchill — no fewer than 35 of them in movies and 28 on television. He is one of the best three. ‘I knew I didn’t look like him,’ Oldman has said. ‘I thought that with some work I could approximate the voice.

National Army Museum

I used to love the National Army Museum in Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, which was crammed with the memorabilia of four centuries of the British Army. I even visited it on the morning of my wedding. It taught you about the history of the British Army in a completely non-political way, allowing the objects —

Jaipur Notebook

Did Winston Churchill, like Donald Trump, also like to ‘grab them by the pussy?’ Last week at the Jaipur Literary Festival, I was on a panel discussion entitled ‘Churchill: Hero or Villain?’, where the Indian biographer Shrabani Basu told a large crowd that at a suffragettes’ demonstration outside Parliament in November 1910, Churchill, then home

Dear Mary: I’m addicted to Gogglebox

From Andrew Roberts Q. My wife and I are addicted to the brilliant TV series Gogglebox, which makes us feel proud to be British. We know two of the people who appear on it socially and might be meeting them in the new year. How can we show our appreciation of their superb, hilarious and

Fidel Castro was a cruel dictator. Ignore the revisionists

Why are left-wing dictators always treated with more reverential respect when they die than right-wing ones, even on the Right? The deaths of dictators like Franco, Pinochet, Somoza are rightly noted with their history of human rights abuses front and centre, but the same treatment is not meted out to left-wing dictators who were just

Has Jeremy Corbyn rebelled against himself and voted Leave?

How do you think Jeremy Corbyn voted in the privacy of the booth? Might he have kept his 100 per cent record of rebellion by even rebelling against himself, and voting Leave in line with his long-held anti-EU beliefs? It won’t be long before politicians start tweeting selfies with their ballot papers; a ghastly development,

Diary – 22 June 2016

It was a nice touch that MPs sat in each other’s seats in the Commons during the tributes to Jo Cox on Monday. I hope it helped remind Tories where they’ll be sitting permanently after 2020 if they don’t bind the party’s wounds on Friday. If Remain wins, then everyone must coalesce around David Cameron;

Premier league

At a large Tory breakfast meeting that David Cameron spoke to recently, the tables were named after all of the Conservative premiers of the past: the good, the bad and Ted Heath. So there were the Lord Salisbury, Harold Macmillan and Margaret Thatcher tables, for example. (I was delighted to be on the Winston Churchill

The Queen’s achievement

There will be much reason to celebrate Her Majesty the Queen becoming the longest-reigning monarch in British history. Although it has been well over a century since monarchs have had regular, direct, significant influence on political decision-making in Britain, the influence the Queen has on the tone, values and sense of identity of the nation

Save our Van Dyck!

Why should a portrait of a Flemish painter by a Flemish painter be considered so important to Britain that the culture minister Ed Vaizey has slapped a three-month export delay on it, and the National Portrait Gallery has announced a £12.5 million campaign to keep it in the country? Moreover, why is it so important

My last chance to follow in Napoleon’s footsteps

St Helena, the island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on which Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled and died, is so far away from anywhere else that even pirates never discovered it. The only way to get there is by the last Royal Mail ship in existence, RMS St Helena, after a six-day journey from

#JustStopIt

‘You know, if becoming an MP has taught me one thing it’s respect, admiration for political opponents,’ tweeted Louise Mensch, the Tory MP for Corby, last week. ‘My Labour colleagues best people ever.’ It’s ironic that she should have vouchsafed these thoughts in a tweet, because it is Twitter that is fast destroying whatever respect

Obama’s fatal delay

The final collapse of the Gaddafi regime is being hailed by Democrats as a triumph for the slowly-but-surely approach of the Obama administration, whereas it is anything but. In fact, it is further indication that we are moving towards, as the title of Fareed Zakaria’s latest book puts it, The Post-American World. The final collapse