Since that time, Roberts has produced voluminous history books on the Second World War and Napoleon, and also a steady stream of political columns in British newspapers and magazines. (Roberts has gone on to write extensively about Churchill and his legacy, seeking to rescue the former Prime Minister from recent attempts to scrutinize his racism and imperialism.) “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples,” which drew criticism from liberals for sanitizing imperial atrocities in India and southern Africa, established Roberts as a favored chronicler of history for American conservatives. Roberts wrote the book as an homage to one of his heroes, Winston Churchill, who had written his own book on the subject bearing essentially the same title. Roberts’s book “ A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900,” with its unapologetic embrace of the legacy of Anglo-American history, had been promoted by Vice-President Dick Cheney, and captured the conservative Zeitgeist in the U.S.

(Nov.In 2007, the British historian Andrew Roberts was invited for a one-on-one meeting with President George W. Though Roberts occasionally forgoes nuance in favor of salvaging his subject’s reputation, this is an eye-opening portrait of the man and his times. Roberts blames policy mistakes such as the repeal of the Stamp Act on parliament’s factious politics contrasts George’s “staunchly conservative” economic views with those of Prime Minister William Pitt, who oversaw “millions spent on an ever expanding theatre of conflict” and alleges that the king suffered from “recurrent manic-depressive psychosis,” rather than a hereditary blood disorder, as was commonly believed. In Roberts’s view, George III was a loving husband and father, a champion of the Enlightenment, and a constitutional monarchist who ruled in a tumultuous era when America was reaching “political maturity” and Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War brought uncertainty about how the empire would be run and who would pay for it.

Historian Roberts ( Churchill: Walking with Destiny) paints the British monarch, who ruled from 1760 until his death in 1820, as “well-meaning, hard-working, decent, dutiful, moral, cultured and kind,” the near-polar opposite of the “wicked tyrannical brute” described by Thomas Paine and other American patriots.

“The American Revolution is a testament not to George III’s tyranny, which was fictitious, but to Americans’ yearning for autonomy,” according to this meticulously researched revisionist biography.

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