Lessons from Churchill and Napoleon — Andrew Roberts

Tim Ferriss interviews historian Andrew Roberts about how great war leaders like Napoleon and Churchill developed their capacity for command, steady nerves, and a sense of personal destiny. Roberts shares his own writing craft, including avoiding hedging 'cheat words,' the value of a brilliant editor, his daily diary habit, and writing in long uninterrupted flow states. They explore lessons from history, the explanatory limits of charisma, and the immortality of words versus monuments. Roberts closes with his pessimism about Britain's declining pride in its history and the cultural cost of tearing down statues of flawed founders.

• Roberts was approached at Cambridge in the mid-1980s as a potential recruit for MI6, going through an absurd application process with rapid-fire questions like ranking aristocratic titles in order of social precedence.
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• Roberts argues that the war-leadership greatness of Napoleon and Churchill was 'much more nurture than nature' - both were educated in war, were voracious readers, and possessed a self-confident 'Holy Fire' belief in their cause.
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• Roberts calls Napoleon the prime exemplar of war leadership because he is the only commander he can think of who could do everything - winning whether advancing or retreating, defending or attacking - and even won five victories in seven days in the 1814 campaign while badly outnumbered.
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• Roberts cautions that a sense of destiny isn't reserved for good men - Adolf Hitler credited Providence for surviving the July 20, 1944 Stauffenberg bomb plot, and cult leaders like David Koresh and Jim Jones used the same self-mythology.
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• The key trait that made Churchill great was learning from his many mistakes (Gallipoli, the gold standard, female suffrage, the Black and Tans) - and Roberts credits the democratic system with 'pricking the pomposity and hubris' that destroyed non-democratic leaders.
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• Roberts argues charisma, charm, and sexiness are nearly impossible to explain on the page, which is why some historical figures (like Lincoln) take on mythic proportions while others fade into obscurity.
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• Roberts admits he is a pessimist about Britain's future, citing pride in British history collapsing from 86% to 56% in recent years, and calls tearing down statues of figures like Thomas Jefferson 'a form of cultural suicide.'
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• Roberts's prep-school history teacher Christopher Perry would sit cross-legged on the table doing voices of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, and tested students on 300 dates per term - nearly every child scored at least 298.
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• Roberts refuses to use words like 'perhaps,' 'maybe,' 'possibly,' and 'probably,' calling them 'cheat words' that signal to a paying reader the author hasn't worked hard enough; he uses phrases like 'it is said that' instead.
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• Napoleon told troops before the 1799 Battle of the Pyramids that '40 centuries look down upon you,' placing the day in a long historical arc - a technique Churchill mirrored by referencing history in roughly 10 percent of his 1940 speeches.
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• Roberts owns a framed 1959 letter from Aldous Huxley quoting that '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 us.'
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• Roberts cites Dr. Johnson's advice that when you write your most brilliant purple paragraph, you should read it again and rip it up - because work you're 'hugging yourself with glee' over is often rubbish.
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• The cover of Roberts's Napoleon biography featured a giant 'N' surrounded by bees (Napoleon's symbol, able to sting and make honey) with neither author nor subject named - and the book sold half a million copies.
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• To clear history from his mind on hiking holidays, Roberts reads detective novelist Robert Goddard and maps out the suspects in the back of the book like an org chart - but the author always beats him.
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• Roberts describes British history teaching jumping 'from Henry to Hitler,' and cites a survey where about 23% of British teens thought Denzel Washington won the American War of Independence and 20% thought Winston Churchill was fictional while Sherlock Holmes and Eleanor Rigby were real.
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• At the 1953 coronation, a young American student in Westminster Hall asked Churchill for life advice and he replied: 'Study history, study history, for therein lies all the secrets of statecraft' - the source of Roberts's coat-of-arms motto.
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• Roberts co-wrote 'Conflict' with General David Petraeus, who commanded armies of over 160,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Gaza war broke out on October 7, the very day the hardback was published.
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