Life and times

The historian and author on lecturing in prisons, and why the news’s ‘silly season’ is anything but

Historian Andrew Roberts

TOGETHER WITH the minister in charge of prisons, Rory Stewart, I’m launching a new initiative called Historians in Prisons, to try to inspire prisoners to read and study history. Several leading historians have already said they will deliver pro bono lectures on their chosen subjects in prisons across England and Wales.

As I went into the library at Wandsworth Prison recently, someone came up to me and said, ‘Hello Andrew. I haven’t seen you since Cambridge.’ It was a friend from my old college, who I later ascertained had committed a rather spectacular white-collar crime. We chatted about Stephen Hawking, another member of the college, whose memorial service he would have attended had he not been otherwise detained. Every time I leave a prison, having lectured there, I remind myself not to break the law.

IN THE GREAT BURKA DEBATE last month, it was argued that there is something profoundly un-british about the authorities telling people what they can or cannot wear. Yet, in fact, the Elizabethans used to pass laws telling people that they couldn’t wear certain types of hat unless they were gentlemen, and, of course, Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascist blackshirt supporters were banned from wearing political uniforms under the Public Order Act of 1936.

In November 1974, 12 Sinn Féiners were fined for wearing black berets during a demonstration in Hyde Park. Banning the burka is therefore not entirely foreign to our laws and customs. Much more British is to encourage the assimilation of everyone into our way of life, which the burka is deliberately intended to render next to impossible.

THE OTHER THING that the burka debate did was to remind us that there is nothing remotely silly about the so-called ‘silly season’ of August. As the late, great former political journalist for The Telegraph Frank Johnson used to point out annually at this time, it was the month that the Germans invaded Belgium in 1914 and Hitler gave the order to invade Poland in 1939. Indeed, the list of important things that have happened in August going back to the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572 is so long it’s a wonder any politician chooses to go on holiday then.

THERE ARE NOW no fewer than 350 literary festivals in this country; it seems as though every village has one. Most are great, though some can be rather crushing. I once spoke at the Sevenoaks Literary Festival and fewer people turned up than there were oaks. The historian Natalie Livingstone has set up a superb new one at Cliveden in Berkshire, and I’m proud to be its president.

The biggest perk is staying in the Lady Astor Suite. Meghan Markle spent the night before her wedding at Cliveden, and in becoming the Duchess of Sussex, she’s added yet another duchess to the long line of those who have been connected to that magnificent building.

This is the festival’s second year, and we’ve got more than 60 speakers, including Ruth Wilson, Niall Ferguson, Armando Iannucci, Simon Schama, Norman Foster, David Olusoga, Antony Beevor and Stephen Frears. Simon Sebag Montefiore will be interviewing me, and I’m hoping his first question won’t be the one asked by everyone: ‘Winston Churchill? Surely there can’t be anything new for you say about him.’

Churchill: Walking with Destiny, by Andrew Roberts, is out on 4 October (Penguin, £35). Cliveden Literary Festival takes place on 29-30 September (clivedenliteraryfestival.org)

Every time I leave a prison, I remind myself not to break the law