Why Churchill Still Matters: Andrew Roberts on Great Men in History

Peter Robinson (0:00)

Great Men in History, Winston Churchill, and a question, where are the great figures today? Historian Andrew Roberts on Uncommon Knowledge now.

Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson, a graduate of Gonville and Keyes at Cambridge. Andrew Roberts has established himself as a major historian. In the words of Victor Davis Hansen, I'm quoting Victor, the finest biographer writing in English.

Lord Roberts has published some 20 books, including biographies of Lord Salisbury, King George III, and Napoleon. He may be best known for his 2018 volume, Churchill, Walking with Destiny, now widely considered the finest one-volume work on the great man. In 2022, King Charles III created Andrew Roberts, the Baron Roberts of Belgravia. Lord Roberts is now a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, a particularly active member of the House of Lords, and the host of the podcast, Secrets of Statecraft. Andrew, welcome to Uncommon Knowledge.

Andrew Roberts (1:10)

Thank you very much indeed, Peter. It's great to be back on the show.

Peter Robinson (1:16)

We'll come to Churchill. Of course we'll come to Churchill. When you're at this table, we get to Churchill.

But a couple of questions that occurred to me as I was pulling my notes together. You have devoted your biographies to large vivid figures, George III, Napoleon, Salisbury, Halifax, and of course Churchill. You implicitly take sides in a debate on the importance of great men in history.

I'd like to explain that. Just give me a moment to set it up. We have Thomas Carlyle in 1841 famously saying, the history of the world is but the biography of great men. Then we have by the mid 20th century, a counter reaction to the great man theory. The historian who comes to my mind is Ferdinand Braudel, the French historian. He writes a 1949 classic, The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, in which Philip II barely appears. The great man is almost entirely gone. Instead, we get demography, geography, the rise of economic structures. Braudel writes, he speaks of l'histoire événementielle. I'm talking to a member of the House of Lords, so I reckon the least I could do is talk a little French. But he's talking about events in history. That's the bit that's rulers and great figures. Then he talks about the longue durée, the centuries, which is the bit of structures, slow moving processes. And Braudel writes, events, the place of the great figures, events are mere surface disturbances, crests of foam on the tides of history.

Andrew Roberts, I put it to you that you have devoted your professional life to writing about mere crests of foam.

Andrew Roberts (3:07)

I don't agree with Braudel. I think that, of course, when you have massive subjects such as industrialization or the rise of science and the decline of magic, and things like that, then individuals aren't key. But one can't say that the great wars of history, for example, Philip II being a very good example because he tried to invade Britain, apart from anything else, don't matter. Of course, they do, and some individuals that I've written about, such as Winston Churchill in 1940 or Napoleon in 1812, take decisions which do affect the world. If they hadn't been there, then certain things would not have happened. There's no way that France would have invaded Russia in 1812, absent Napoleon Bonaparte, for example.

I think what TS. Eliot, you're right, it was the mid-20th century. TS. Eliot also then, of course, talked about vast impersonal forces in history. They are there constantly, but it requires the specks of foam to direct them.

Peter Robinson (4:13)

All right. Now, here's a bit where I really truly, even more than usual, really don't know what I'm talking about. But it occurs to me, so I'm going to trot this out and see what you make of it. It occurs to me that in the Hebrew scriptures, we have very clearly an emphasis on the great figures from Moses on, Moses, David, Saul, Solomon, and so forth. That's consonant at least with the approach that we read about in Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey are stories of heroes, of great figures. Then we get the New Testament, and Christianity mixes things up a bit because now we get ordinary people. We get the woman at the well, we get the leper, we get Bartimaeus the blind beggar. In Christianity, there's a tension introduced or something new introduced, that we're still dealing with. Christianity itself, it occurs to me, feels entirely free to disagree, but it occurs to me that St. Paul is a great man, and immensely learned as Pharisee. He's a citizen of the Roman Empire, he's widely traveled, he writes letter after letter after letter. They're all immensely learned. He's quoting scriptures in the letters, and St. Peter, the humble fisherman, is an ordinary figure. Okay. Now, it occurred to me that Churchill understands his place.