Hello boys and girls ladies and gyrms, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. Where does 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 20 books, which have been translated into 28 languages and have won 13 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 Patreus. 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's also a member of the House of Lords. You can find all things Andrew at AndrewHeifenroberts.net online and he's also on x, the artist formerly known as Twitter at x.com slash a Roberts underscore Andrew. And we're going to get to the interview, but quickly, before that, just a few words about our sponsors who make this show possible.
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Shopify.com slash Tim got a Shopify.com slash Tim to take your business to the next level today. One more time all lowercase Shopify.com slash Tim. 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 crannly after your A levels. Did you now what happened? What did you know that's the way we're going to make friends and get on with these. You're going to mention the reason that has expelled from school.
I'm going to mention the reason because you don't know. Absolutely good. I don't think I'm the first person ever as a young man to get drunk and climb up buildings. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. I'm on a tradition. Hallelujah. But I'm not the only person to happen to. But quite understandably the school chucked me out before I fell off one of them.
You know, and they and they'd got blamed it led to actually one of my wife's most brilliant with his wife and she said yes and all Andrews done since in life is to get drunk and social climb. That is not bad. Is it all right. We might come back to that. 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 and New Hampshire where they
do have the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, four and so on. So that much I know. But I think in the same piece where I found the crannly bit in doing the research. Also found note that you were approached as a possible candidate for MI6 a bit later on. No, that was when I was at Cambridge. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. That's the right time to be approached for MI6 is because Cambridge and MI6 have had a long and fairly disastrous career.
Needless to say, all of the worst spies in the 1930s, traders of the 1930s went to Cambridge. But yeah, it was a fascinating thing. I was just going down from university and somebody in my college, one of the domes who still there actually approached me and said how about it would you be interested in becoming a spy and so automatically needless to say you just think of yourself as James Bond immediately.
That's sort of done the land and done the land and the back of your brain, you're automatically there with your burrito and the beautiful women and all that. 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's kind of thing put them in order and all that. There were also things like place in order of social precedent, Prince Duke, Viscount, Mark, Quizz, Baronette.
You think, well, exactly. You're an American. You're allowed to not going to ask that in the CIA. But in for some reason, in MI6 back, this was I hastened to back in the sort of mid 1980s. That was one of the questions. What did the Don think made you a potential candidate? Well, that also was 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 really. And he saw the person interviewing him for a tick in the margin next to the question. I wonder if that made you more or less desire much more desirable. I can say, they think they take the thing right. I can answer what James Bond, he's not kind person. Is he really?
No, no, no. You view them as disposable pleasures. Well, perhaps. 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 preps school, which in the English version means when you'll sort of tend to 13. 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 kind man. He wouldn't have made it into my six. That he was a sort of old school history master of the best possible kind. What?
Characterize that you said narrative, but 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 sort of sit cross-legged on the table and give you the voice of Charles the first and then the voice of all of a crumble, you know, he Elizabeth the first and Mary Queen of Scots.
He would entrance you with the excitement of the unfolding story everywhere, 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 300 dates and not a child in that class didn't get at least 298 of them right.
It's an extraordinary way of teaching. It did an entirely through inspiration rather than through just sort of standing there under blackboard ordering people to remember, you know, what happened in 1356 or 1415. Did he have any theater background? You just thought. You would have thought. Just 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 10-year-old Andrew Roberts was concerned. We have a sort of rental library behind us in this room that I've rented and one of the books sitting over there, the Powerbroker, 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. He managed to make that interesting. But you've got a few other ones. You've got a great friend of mine, Neil Ferguson writing about his book, Colossus. You've got some pretty interesting people, few people that I've met. And so you might have rented it, but it's a pretty good dimension.
And it's also quite surreal that Neil has featured here since he is, I'd say partially responsible for us meeting in the first place. Yeah, he told me definitely to go on your show. He said, ladies and people watch it and you've got a good sense of him. We'll see. We'll see about the sense of him. We'll see later. We'll see later. Yeah, the jury is out. 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 going to just come up with some kind of theory here. Bear with me. You shouldn't do that. If the person's paid $40 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 on to 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 has told that or, you know, anecdotally people stated that. And that's the signal to the reader. This is probably not true at all. It's a number of hedging the best. Yeah, but it's too good to leave out. But perhaps probably a maybe and so on. There you really are hedging your bets. 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 records. And the reason I'm asking about it is this is supposed to sub question. How much of it do you think is nature versus nurture also? But feel free to take that in 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 so on.
They had a egotism to look at it in the negative way, but a self confidence 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 you know, in both cases as far as they were concerned. There was a sort of holy fire that they both had. There was a not only in a religious sense, obviously, it's 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 at awake at night over even the death of friends. That they were responsible for their response for in the cases of Churchill and Napoleon, we could bring up other names or in the expo's when you're in the royal we're here, you could bring up other names.
Were there particular philosophers or writers that they found particularly instructive for the leaned on in some sense that they found solace and were the particular minds. Certainly Churchill did because he was a huge reader. He was a massive auto-died act. He never went to university and so therefore when he was a young subaltern in India in his early 20s, he sat down and read the greats.
He was a philosopher as well as writers and he was particularly influenced by Gibbon and McCauley, the two greats and 19th century historians, English historians. That affected his writing style and of course later his oratorical style, but also his outlook on life, philosophical outlook on life. With the Royalty Napoleon, he was even more literary, because he also wrote short stories and books and so on. He was very much affected by what he read again as a young man.
In both cases, it's slightly, they were reading so much that it slightly cut them off from their contemporaries. Napoleon didn't have many friends when he was in his early 20s and Churchill when the other people were sleeping in the midday heat of India, his colleagues and comrades. He'd be sitting there reading Chopin Hauer and Gibbon and McCauley and so on. How did Gibbon and McCauley inform his philosophical leanings?
They made him into what was called at the time a week. We don't have them today obviously, but they were in modern sense, I suppose, liberal conservatives who believed in Noblesse Blege in the importance of... Noblesse Blege, it's 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 sort of like the nightly, chivalry concept that you get from the Middle Ages. They very much believed in that and so did Churchill. Let me ask about Napoleon. I know shockingly little about Napoleon. I'm a barris 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 were 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. In the last three years of his military career, he was losing, but even then, even when he had far fewer troops when he was retreating when he was defending Paris in the 1814 campaign, for example, he was still able to win five victories in seven days in the 1814 campaign. That's two years after the retreat for Moscow.
It's quite extraordinary 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 center. As it ousted it, he had that capacity, 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, the pleasing the name as it were, but in fact, the long lasting things that actually dragged, for instance, the 19th century, were things like the Codenapolian, which were not a revolutionary concept, they were a Napoleonic concept.
This may seem like 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 de-cathlete 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. 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 warfare. He's been educated in it. He read the key books, there's a guy called the Compte de Giabert, who in 1772 wrote a book about strategy and tactics, and he 30 years later put these into operation.
And so he was able to spot the sort of best of the best when it came to a modern thinking, and to, or in this case, 30-year-old thinking in fact, that didn't matter because the weapons of war hadn't changed in the intervening period. And he was able to put those thoughts and ideas into practical use, the classic example being the core system. What was it called? It's called the core system. It's basically... How do I worry?
CORPS. 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 core would engage the enemy and then he would use the other cause to outmaneuver and envelop the enemy, sometimes double envelop the enemy. It was a brilliant concept. And 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... I mean, victory obviously is the best thing when it comes to excite encouragement. Exactly. Nothing much works better than that. But as I say, you're 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, it wasn't interesting in electrifying the soul of the men at all. Well, the despise is ordinary soldiers, but nonetheless, Duke of Wellington, he had some sort of choice, negative remarks about his own soldiers. And he was rather sort of stuffy, he aristocrat, that they loved him because he cared about how many of them died in battle.
And he never lost the battle as well, which is a very useful thing in a commander needless to say. And when he tried, he didn't go out, he would think it beneath him to go out and try to inspire the men. Whereas Napoleon, his choice of hat and his great codes and his way of taking off his own medals and giving them to soldiers on the battlefields, and his orders of the day, his proclamations before the Battle of the Pyramids in 1799, he said,
40 centuries look down upon you. And 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, he's placing the events of that day in the long historical parabola. And Churchill did that too, by the way, of course, to a great degree.
In about 10% of all of the speeches that Churchill gave in 1940, there's some reference to history all 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 straits before, look at, to France is straight, look at Admiral Nelson and so on.
He came through those and won. He also brought up the first world war lot. 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 Euclomobros, with Wellington, the best soldier that Britain ever produced. People trusted his view of history. So instead of biographies, I'd like to ask about autobiography. It's my impression that you recommend that young people read my early life.
And that there are life lessons contained within it that perhaps might help young people. What types of good advice or life lessons can people expect to find in that book? Or does anything stand out to you? Oh, yes, well, blow to the moon resilience since the classic one, although he doesn't go in this book into criticizing 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 and wonderful it is to be young 20 to 25, those of the years, he says people will forgive you for mistakes you make in that period. It's an aunt until you're 30 that people judge you on what you've achieved rather than your promise and so on. So it took it's a he writes about his time his escape from prison, for example, which is facing there is no young man or woman who hasn't at some stage, drenned about the idea of a successful prison 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 Lancers in he himself had a pistol in a great cavalry charge. Now, these are it's just the most exciting book and it draws you along with life lessons that are very good, I think, even for today at a time when you're frankly unlikely to have to escape from prison or get a part in a cavalry charge.
Or it's very unsuccessful at attempting to escape prison, modern lock down, I can't let this go. It's sticking in my mind the core strategy, I'm not sure strategies 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 improve 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 completely revolutionized at France.
And so he took the writing from 30 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 was taking huge risks, he was 26 years old and according to the the Churchill view of life, you know, you can take risks when you're 26 years old because people forgive you actually the French Revolution government would not have forgiven Napoleon if he'd lost the army of Italy in 1796, but nonetheless he was 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 26, he was fighting generals who were Austrian generals who were in their 70s. 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 so on.
And so he was a psychology, a great deal trying to get into the minds of the generals he was opposed to is a great chooser of left headents of divisional commanders and people who he felt he could trust superb sense of timing as well in a battle. He was some, as I say, sort of exemplar of so many of the leadership tropes.
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. And if they came off, this is the thing, in the Italian campaign, this first great campaign of his, he hardly lost a battle. He fought for 20 and sort of 119 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. And he would even luck, which was very important. 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 21st century rationalists can possibly believe in, but you know, it worked for him.
Yeah, seems to work until it didn't until it doesn't. Yeah, so the decision in 1812 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. All right, now Aldous Huxley, I believe this is we English. Aldous. God, you know, I've realized the longer I spend in England, I really need to, I think I should take to full classes. Test of English is a foreign language.
You need to brush up on the mother tongue as I were. 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? Let's actually was written from Los Angeles where he was living in the 1950s was in 1959. 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 obviously asked for some sort of deep meaningful thought.
And the deep meaningful thought that Huxley gave him. And I'm a huge admirer of Huxley, I listen, Garza and obviously Brave New World and so on. A wonderful works. And he said in this letter, the 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. That is so true. There's not a book that I've written. I've written 20 books. There's not a book that I've written.
And I haven't looked across that frame letter in my study and thought, wow, that is just so perceptive. So if you're question about the subtitle of your biography, which I believe is walking with destiny, you mentioned this holy fire. I think it's 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 of the last few pages of his war memoirs, the first volume of his war memoirs, the gathering storm. Wonderful work. 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 would 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 better preparation for this hour and for this trial. And he had a profound sense of personal destiny.
Now, you and I might think, as 21st century rationalist, that this is a bit sort of mad to think that you're preordained to save, in this case, Britain and civilization. If you said that to me, 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 that it's not insane to think that. But it's not by any means just an Napoleon also felt that he had a star to guide him.
And he had the luck that we spoke about earlier, but the luck who was a woman in his case was somebody he needed to woo and to try to seduce. And of course, in 1812, she turns her back on him and he speaks of her in that sense, which is also pretty 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 exist in people.
If you could 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 be the day that I just mentioned.
It would be the 10th of May 1940, the day that Hitler's invading, the cabinet meets and recognizes 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, whereby Neville Chamberlain goes to the king and suggests 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 cannon.
But nonetheless, he's willing to call Churchill Churchill and then goes to Buckingham Palace and becomes Prime Minister and comes back and starts to organize his government. As the news is coming in of the German success and victories in the on the western front. I mean, this is water day, water 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 a sense of destiny because of course it isn't just great men as in good men, positive forces in history that has this at off Hitler. But also had a sense of destiny when he were in Providence and Lark and being watched over by bigger forces and so on.
When he survived his assassination attempt on the 20th of July 1944, when you remember Stalfenburg moves the briefcase with the bomb in it to appoint in the table that just shreds hit this trousers when it goes off and doesn't go limp. He also put it down to Providence that he had been allowed to survive and therefore to stay in charge and the furrow is going to save the Fatherland and the Reich.
So it's not something I don't want your 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 more powerful force who's saving you to become the world saving figure. You can cut a lot of different ways. So David, David Kuresh and called leaders and. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And Jones down in Ghana where every was they all of these all of these fruits and cooks and comment easy as well.
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That's linkedin.com slash Tim to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. 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. He'd scarcely point out but Churchill certainly did he made mistake often mistake. He got female suffrage wrong.
The abdication 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 Dalton L's crisis of 1915 to early 1916 where over a hundred thousand allied troops were killed, wounded or captured. There was a series of mistakes in every single one of them he learns from those mistakes.
How did he do that? I like because there's this probably I would think maybe some method behind the matters maybe it's just more self-awareness or reflection but did he have a process for learning? He wasn't he hebristic that was the key thing. He probably helps also of course to do is in the democratic system unlike Napoleon Hitler whereby 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 pricking the pomposity and hubris of people if it's working properly. Napoleon also learned 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 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. He stayed too long in Moscow but if he'd gone to Moscow and then come back again immediately he would not have had the climactic disasters that overcame him with the blizzards in the October and November of 1812. So you have this sense that yes it was a appalling strategic error but it wasn't done out of drive because he thought he was a sort of demigod. That I think is a misunderstanding of his personality.
So I'm going to ask something that Neil Ferguson of classes on the shelf put in an email. I would ask Andrew about the diary he keeps which is a source of intense anxiety. He's obsessed. Okay, finished the rest of which is a source of intense anxiety to all of his friends and even more to his enemies best wishes. Neil. Neil doesn't care about any of that. He's only cares about what I say about him. He is the friend. He is the friend who is obsessed with the diary.
Yes, I keep a diary for God's sake. Is it such a crime? We went on the skiing holiday this year and it's all he talked about. He's obsessed. The forbidden fruit. What is the story here? I think he's kicking himself that he didn't keep on. You think of all these extraordinary people he meets. Every time I see him he's just been talking to President G or BB Netanyahu or President of America. And he doesn't write down and 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... I can see that. Thank you. Well, that's kind of you. Thank you. One of the only ways that I can justify this concept that it's all not just the sort of, you know, nihilistic sort of mailed straw.
And boondog all exactly is by writing books, obviously, which I hear will survive me, but also noting down what I've done in the day. But nihil is convinced that every time he says anything embarrassing or something, I'm going to be... You're just loading the arrow. I'm learning to your diary. Exactly. And when we're sort of 80, he's going to...
He's going to go to the bookshop by the diary, flick to Ferguson, come and nihil, and see sort of 40 entries each of which is going to make his face go redder to the following charges. Exactly. But it's not going to be like that at all. What he's actually going to do is to immediately go to the diary and look up Ferguson, nihil. See all the amusing, charming, intelligent, remarks he's made, the widgets, you know, and all that kind of thing.
And not just him, obviously, everybody I've ever met over the last 40 plus years. How do you... You're on your metal now. You're going to have to, I'm going to say, went on to be very serious. That's just behavior. Exactly. What an idiot. No, not to self send chocolates to Andrew. Don't forget his birthday. Now there are many people who keep the diary. How do you keep your diary? Is it a nightly exercise? No. It's typed out. No, you mustn't do it nightly.
You mustn't do it nightly because you might be able to, but I drink. I like drinking. Good. Yeah. And so there's nothing worse than trying to write if you've been drinking also, writing down the wishes and sometimes there's a bit of a problem. I mean, to the fact that I can't read my writing, but it's 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 with what's your frequency? I used to write it every day. I used to write it.
Oh no, but if nothing interesting has happened, then I wouldn't put anything down. Nothing to report. Yeah. No. Well, there's all like Louis XVI on the 14th of July 1789, the day of the fall of the Bastille. All he writes is, Rhea, nothing. So I hope I'm not going to be quite as moronic as that. It's not really intended for publication, which is another thing that deals. You're going to lie to onto that, but really part of that sounds.
He's going like, you see? You see? Yeah. Yeah. No. Of course he is. But nonetheless, I do find it a, what do you mentioned earlier about how many words I write? It's never more than about 500 words maximum. And it picks the most interesting parts of the day. And if somebody has said or done something interesting, I'll stick it in. Do you do that before your book writing? Let's say you're on. Yes. You do. It's posting in the morning. All right.
And is that just like pajama slippers and a cup of coffee? Yeah. So I see that. Yeah. All right. Great. Exactly. And do you take, 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 break 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.
Because it might not come back if you deliberately have breaks. Sometimes. And I'm slightly late to admit this public. But sometimes if you are really flowing, I can go without, you know, washing for three days. I can be in my dressing gown 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 get some breakfast, you know, and so on. But that will just be a dash to the wall. 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 long as we go back to the 10th of May 1940, 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 what the lovefathers attacking and he's then having to create his government. He then goes off to the House of Commons and so on. And he's just relentless. And unless you encapsulate in 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 hate to say that it's never more than three days. I've ever gone to that show. I wouldn't judge. I was just on I can trip. I went 10 days without showering. So I don't judge. I want to throw stones in my glass house. It's only when I'm writing a book. I hate to have that as well, God. I don't want people to come up and show your parts as old as they're nose and go, hello, Andrew.
How do you think about that flow with writing? 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 going to have to start the juggling process all over again. The boot up sequence takes a long time. How do you think about the flow of writing or that feeling that things are coming to you more easily or moving on to the page more easily? Sometimes it's a very bad thing.
Of course, Dr. Johnson did say when you have written your most brilliant purple paragraph, we did again and rip it up. So you must have told him more about that. If you think that you've just written something completely brilliant, there's a very good chance that is rubbish. It has to be somebody else. It has to be your publisher also.
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 it's complete. It's complete. You could either name my memoir, hugging yourself with Glee, and I write that down, giving your customer a 5%. That's fine.
If you had to choose, maybe you don't want to choose from your darlings here, but if this question has an answer, you don't even need to name them, but you could keep a person in mind. If you had to choose one person to act as your perforator for your work to be that sanity check. He's called Stuart Profetti. He's the best brilliant upper show in London. He's known by everybody to be the most brilliant. He's also the most irritating. He's an excellent peasant.
He's going to listen to this so I can act to be as nice as possible. He's a professor perfect. He's my nickname for it. He's a total professorial figure. For my Napoleon book, I remember a series of marginelia. Again, this is the thing where you think you've done something rather good. He writes, one of the things he wrote in the manga, are you sure this joke is funny? Nothing more crashing than to have that. He also wrote... Structure is very British. Exactly. Question mark.
You read it again. You draw tools yourself. Yes, it is funny. And you're like, dammit. He wrote the whole series of them. We were talking earlier about the 1796 campaign of Napoleon. He said, how wide was the river per in 1796? There was another one. Did Napoleon take a rhodotus to Egypt? He said, I can't do that. I don't know. I'm going to have to find out. 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 a particular type of thing, but I will give my chapter, let's just say, to a friend who's a really good lawyer. Part of the reason for that is that they're very good at trimming out excess. And if anything is ambiguous, they're good. Or contradictory. They're very good at surgically excising that.
What makes this particular gentleman, what was his name again, Stuart? Stuart Profit. Great name. What makes Stuart so good? At giving feedback. Does he see things differently? He's a profoundly committed to history. He loves history. So he has a sort of higher purpose to try to flood the world with great history books, which is, as far as I'm concerned, the greatest purpose that you can have. I mean, this doesn't get better than that. He has a very logical brain. He's very good on syntax.
So anything that doesn't sound right in a sentence, he will point out sometimes to have a sense of origin 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 rhyme in them, and he will cut that automatically because it just doesn't feel right. Well, with a sentiment of his. Precisely. And mine, I hate him too. I'm very rarely actually disagree with him. I did on the joke.
By the way, and whenever anybody tells me that that particular joke is funny, I... For a turn. I thought it was. I thought it was. I ping the email straight on to, 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 40 years, so, and he's at the top of his trade. So you would expect him to be really good, but boy, you see.
So there's two examples you gave, the width of the river and herodototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototototot
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 Napoleon just had a huge n on it and lots of bees and he said, phoned me up he said, I've got this idea for the front cover of the book, your name isn't going to be on it. And he said, and neither is Napoleon. And I thought over the
book and I thought, okay, he's finally gone completely crap. Yeah, exactly. That's right. Poor man, how long can he stay in his job if he's going to come up with ideas? I'll be good figure for a while. Yeah, that's right. Exactly, but it can't be long now over full. And it turned out to be totally brilliant concept because if you see a gigantic n with bees, you think of Napoleon, you know, and that's what bees as an absolute.
Bees like honeybees. Honeybees, yeah, that was his symbol, as Napoleon symbol, because they could sting, but they could also give honey, you know, as the idea. And it just captured people's imagination and sold an awful lot of copies, which is really great. That's 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 a steward.
Everyone needs a steward. They take mine. I think you might spend his entire first month on just the syntax errors in my first chapter. So you do want to strangling, by the way, because it's the sign of a very good proofreader often. Why do you think it is that some historical figures take on these mythic proportions where some who have huge impacts seem to 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 to be like, there are some things that are very difficult to get over to people on the printed page. Charisma is one of them. Charm 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. I think the same is true with historical characters. How can it be that this unprepossessing looking American president who happens to, with this strange beard but not moustache, who happens to be president at the time that the country is falling apart, manages to save the country through this terrible sea, 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 sexy. I don't think I've ran Lincoln's case for that. You've heard many of your news, so we just might disagree with you, nonetheless. Just imagining him popping up on a dating app. You do swipe right here, if they're Abe Lincoln. My ride of fixed gear bike make expensive capuchin. That's kind of the hipster look anyway. I digress. Yeah. It is difficult to explain how some people just
grab the headlines and others. I mean, of course, it does help to be a leader in a war. It's a history of Lincoln and Churchill and the period and so on. The chance of coming a world historical figure, if you are Prime Minister of Luxembourg in a time of peace, is going to be much more difficult, of course. But yeah, there doesn't seem to be a hot and fast rule, does that? Hard and fast recipe. And I can follow. I'm scared.
Well, don't take us to war on the map. If you're wanting to be, I don't think I'm not capable. Certainly not eager. Makes me think of, what is the title of that poem? Azimandius, look upon my words and despair. I'll leave that alone. I met a traveler from an antique land who said to Boston, chocolate's legs of stone
stand in the desert. And near them on the sand, half shrunk, shattered visage lies. His wrinkled lip and snare of coal command tells that it sculpts a well those passions red, which yet survive. My name is Azimandius. King of kings look upon my works, he mighty and despair. Nothing besides remains round that eternal wreck, long and bare, the lone and level sand stretch far away. Hard damn. There you go, listeners.
Can you point out to the listeners that you didn't tell me that this was going to happen? I did not. 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 sand. They're the feet. The trunks of the legs. So there was obviously a huge magnificent kind of pyramid high glorious statue to Azimandius. 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 going to, I feel like a cross is not cross examining, but asking too much, but who is the author of that of that, the piece of the Shelley. I saw the one of maybe the original or first, certainly a first draft in Oxford, because I was going through a program at Wattam 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, as they're this morning, Lambeth Panace 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 there today.
Beautiful. And if you're near Oxford, Western 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 who turns out. Thank you. I'm not going to take that personally. No, no, that's a compliment. Yeah, old in the US is like 1970, you know, it's smaller. I thought you were talking about me.
Oh, no, no. No, no, no. No, no, no. How do you think about legacy? Because I, along the lines of Ony of the Azimandis piece, 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've died. Now, I'm not going to know, but they are not. So why on earth, it just seems so logical to even think that doesn't it, that it should matter to me that anything happens. The second off drive died. But I know that I do. And it is
one of the drives for being a writer because words always live forever. And they're virtually the only thing that does Azimandis is statue is just two trunkless legs of stone, whereas actually his words, you know, look upon my works, he might be in despair, that goes to the heart of the human condition. And she'll his poetry still survives in a way that Azimandis statue doesn't. So there is something about words that are immortal and we're all sort
of grasping for immortality and one way or another. Yeah. And it's true. Do you read fiction? Yes. Yes, I do. When I go on holiday, which is 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 hiking, I do read fiction. Sometimes if I want to completely clear my brain, I'll have a detective novel. And I've chosen the
most complicated of all of the detective novelists, Tchepil Robert Goddard. Have you ever heard of Robert Goddard? I have not. So complicated. The who to work out, who done it or what groups of people done it. You know, very rarely does one person and why? And I try and make notes in the back of the book, connecting each person to everybody else. And so by the end of it, it looks like one of those really complicated sort of management. I'm taking an order to
do it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Hundreds of people connecting to everybody else to try and work out, who done it. And he always, always beats me. That's fun. Yeah. I've been getting to do it. The guitar is that sort of high culture writing is not as concerned. I will occasionally do that. I'm president of the Clivton Literary Festival. And so we have lots of novelists
come to that. And so if you've got William Boyd or Salmon Rashedou or somebody who you know you're going to be bumping into the festival, it's always a good idea to read their latest novel. We had Robert Harris recently. And so that's always well worth doing. And then there are a few writers like Michel Welbeck, who is just so great that you have to sort of read whatever he brings out. Because they're, I don't recognize the name. I'm very
interested. He's a French writer. It's pronounced hella-beck. And he's a genius, a very controversial and quite unpopular in France. And the latest one I'm reading is he features his own murder. It's a great satire. It's very, very funny. Is there a book you might suggest starting with? Where are we going to start with? The map and the territory. The map of the territory. The map and the territory of Michel
Welbeck. The name starts H-E-D-L-E-B. And yeah, it's a sort of satire on French intellectual customs. And I can say that with loving that. It's very funny. It's very interesting. Why is he controversial? Because he's particularly politically incorrect as well. He just doesn't care. He just doesn't care what he writes. He's a honey badger in that sense. Do you know what I mean? I do. I do. I do. He's a literary honey badger. He's Welbeck.
Very honey badger. All right. So it's being politically incorrect. How should we in your mind write about imperial history? We should try as far as possible to 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 Winston Churchill and the unobless ablige, the concept that it was part of your duty as a privileged 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 involved in agriculture and so on. You know, they actually were not driven by repacity and greed in the way that essentially the Marxist analysis of imperialism has made out. So be objective. Some of those people were like that.
Undoubtedly, of course, they were, you know, especially some of the people in South Africa 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 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 tutors to the Second World War. And we don't do the very important intervening stages of the Stuart's, the Civil War, the Hannah Varians, 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 once the next, it was a survey quite recently of British teenagers, quite a big survey, and over a thousand of them. And 20% of them thought, as it was like 23% of them, thought that the American War of Independence was won by Denzel Washington. You know, the Americans get a bad route.
No, no, no, exactly. You suggest us. And also, there were 20% of these kids, these are British school kids, who also thought that Winston Churchill was a fictional character. And that Sherlock Holmes and Eleanor Rigby were real people. So whatever's going on in British history teaching, I think there's still a lot to be desired. If you had never been able to write any books in that alternate reality, what have you personally or what would you have gained personally from studying history?
It's a lot of things in that history. It can be a bit of a quicksand. What's that? 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, the friends, especially, that can make you look again at the same period and completely change your mind about it.
And that's a little unnerving at the age of 61, I have to say. I'm just reading Ronald Huttman'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 times around in order to see through. And Ronald Huttman has completely exploded that thesis for me. And I realised that he was like most politicians just sort of grabbing
the co-tales of history and hanging on as much as he could. And yes, he was a good soldier and so on, but he was in terms of his politics. He was constantly trying to create. Lions is 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 Cromwell, like that statue out, it's like Parliament of this incredibly sort of solid figure. He wasn't like that at all.
What are other things that attracted 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 castles. We go on holiday to Wales and see the great Edward I castles. And he would chat to on journeys we 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 recognizing
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 history because they were 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, it could be anywhere, on why people, aside from conflating, you know, denser Washington, other historical figures, why they should read history or engage with history, what would the thrust of the presentation be? I suppose it does come back to that all the Sucks' liquids, you know, about trying to
learn some of the lessons. There's a marvelous moment when in 1953, June 1953, 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 13th 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, Lion State, where Warren Hastings went on trial and Charles I went on trial and people like Mandela and Zelensky have given speeches and things like that. It's compounded. Thomas Moore went on trial there, the Earl of Straford. I just mentioned a whole load of people who were all decapitated actually, as
a William Wallace as well, he was decapitated as well. And so you've got this sense of all of British history, you know, it sums up in a room essentially. And a young American student stops Churchill and asks essentially for a piece of life advice. And Churchill replies, study history, study history, for therein lies all the secrets of state craft.
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 the world or try to work out for themselves, the great forces in our planet today.
So that I suppose would be the answer. That's why I've chosen study history as my motto of my case of arms, for example, and why I've got a podcast too, I call it secrets of state craft. I think that's a sort of motivating factor. Secrets of state craft, that is. It's the who their institutions focus, but it's great fun to do. Must have Neil Ferguson on at some stage and I can tease him about not being a diary. What is state craft?
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 that religious, all of these things together to create the kind of country that you want it to be. And that is state craft. And so it's been going on as long as human history has and always well.
Looking forward, let's see you've studied many great figures from history. You've looked at these different chapters of your late king, your last king, George III, I read a biography of him a few years ago, which was great fun to do. Yeah. Sorry. 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 you
are a betting man, when you say, hmm, 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 pays up 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 20, I can try and get the statistics right. I think it's 2015. As recent as 2015, maybe it's 2010, 86% of people were proud of British history.
That has now fallen down to 56%. And I'm sure that the reason for this is the sustained attack on what the British Empire that we were discussing earlier and people forgetting the part that we played in the abolition of slavery and concentrating just on the horrors and the monstrous things that happened. And we are therefore, if you're not proud of your past, you're not proud of your 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. And it's a form
of cultural suicide. It strikes me not to admire the founders of your nation. And yes, of course, he owns slaves, but he also wrote a constitution that has survived for a quarter of a millennium. And he was brave enough for Washington and all the others brave enough to stand up against the most powerful empire in the world. If these things, you deserve your statue, it seems to me. And if you go around pulling these things down, I think you're
breaking 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 the Tory or so. But not as big a pessimist I hasten to either snill folks who I like to say it's never terribly difficult to tell the it's a quote from PG Woodhouse, never terribly difficult to tell the difference between
a ray of sunshine and a Scotsman with a grievance. And Neil always tells you that it's all doom and gloom and everything's going to be ugly disastrous. I wonder whether or not he cheated, but he's it because he's actually himself a very, you know, upbeat and personally sort of positive individual who does lots of things to imply that actually he does think
the world's going to get better. But boy, boy, how do you personally, if you do, I mean, it seems like you examine or you're a fascination with counterfactuals, the what ifs, you read books that have the potential for upending sort of long held thesis, 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 and she's optimistic about the future. She's in business. She's a very successful business woman. So she actually sees a lot of the innovations that are taking place, the drugs that are coming online that are saving lives and taking on defeating pain and so on, you know, she's greater at believing in the innate capacity of capitalism to reinvent itself in a positive way for more and more people than take people
out of poverty and all of those positive things. It's an invigorating thing to talk about the world with her because it makes me much less sort of e or like and fur, furgothed senes. Feeling any other inside scoop that the people should know about Neil, what are what is his secret optimistic voice memos that he sends you can annotate at your diary.
You see audio reference 47. 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 David Patreus and of course him being a general who's commanded arm is of over 160,000 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've knighted it all for folks just so they have that the evolution of warfare from 1945 to Ukraine. Well, it's now actually Gaza. The paper by it takes it takes us up to up to Gaza as well about halfway through that campaign in Gaza. It was after the Russian invasion of Ukraine that I came up with the idea of 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 going to 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 1945. So we go through not all of them, they're 400 of them, but all the key ones, you know, the 40 or so key ones that you're a perdo of and that show how war has evolved and developed and sometimes it leaps forward and other times it goes into sort of side shows, but we went to the publishers and they quite understand we said well how are you going to divvy up
the chapters? And I said well, David's going to write about all the countries he's invaded and I'll 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 was you do it so well because the situation in Ukraine was moving so quickly and then the guards of war broke out on the day of the publication of the heart back. So that was literally the seventh 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 tend to write
quickly. Yeah. And so does he, you know, he's a soldier scholar. He read, he went to your old 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'm supposed he's not lacking discipline. He 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 mutual respect, which is very important. I'd never written a book with anybody before. And I was doing the midst of doing that right now, which is rather isn't a mask. Yeah. No. Well, it's like nerve-wracking,
isn't it? Because one can get very sort of preparatory on about 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 Ridgeway, you know, in Korea, for example. And that was so
fascinating that I knew that there was nothing that I could add to that. 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 constant rearguard action against not being stimulated. Do you think you will do more collaborations? How are you thinking about your writing? No, I know
my next two books 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 story to write that. I hate each other in a very imaginative way. The greatest reality TV should
ever see. And then after that, I'm doing this really. 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 any university and through his own brilliance. And he was 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. Let me back on the
show in 2030, which is when it's being public. I hope I'll still be around. We'll see. I mean, if I've been here for a decade, we'll see how it goes. And this has been great. I really appreciate you taking the time. People can find you. Correct me if I get any of this wrong. Andrew Hyphen Roberts.net. That'd be the main website. That's what I have here. Co-member, but yes, I hope so. Let's just say that's right. And if it's not, I will put
a great version in the show notes. And then is Twitter or X as it stands now a good place for people to follow you as well. Yeah, that has things like my podcast and so on. Perfect. So that's as I have it here, A Roberts underscore Andrew. Is it good? Yeah. Perfect. We'll fact check off 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
absolutely 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.log such podcast. We will include links to everything we discussed. And also, as always, until next time, just be a little kinder than it's necessary to others, but also to yourself. Thanks for tuning
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