The Daily Stoic - Ask Daily Stoic: Ryan and Historian Andrew Roberts Talk Leadership, Character and How One Person Can Change The World

Episode Date: May 16, 2020

Today Ryan talks with writer and historian Andrew Roberts about the process of writing about historical figures, the ways that character is tested during trying times, Roberts’ take on figures like Napoleon and Lloyd George, and more. Books by Andrew RobertsChurchill: Walking with Destiny: https://geni.us/vi8zNapoleon: A Life: https://geni.us/p3JMb9nLeadership in War: https://geni.us/MCzyPyThe Storm of War: https://geni.us/CKRDmywGet Ego Is the Enemy for just $2.99: https://geni.us/Y6mZ0This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. Four Sigmatic is a maker of mushroom coffee, lattes, elixirs, and more. Their drinks all taste amazing and they've full of all sorts of all-natural compounds and immunity boosters to help you think clearly and live well. Visit http://foursigmatic.com/stoic to get 15% off your order.This episode is also brought to you by Leesa, the online mattress company. Each of their mattresses is made to order and shipped for free right to your door. All mattresses come with a 100-night trial and a 10-year warranty, so you can feel confident in your investment in a good night’s sleep. And Leesa's hybrid mattress has been rated the best overall mattress by sites like Business Insider, Wirecutter, and Mattress Advisor. Daily Stoic listeners get 15% off their entire order with the code STOIC. Just visit Leesa.com and get your mattress today.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanholidayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanholiday/Facebook: http://facebook.com/ryanholidayYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Andrew Roberts: Homepage: https://www.andrew-roberts.net/Twitter: https://twitter.com/aroberts_andrewSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four that can help you live up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here, on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy

in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school. When we have the time to think to go for a walk to sit with our journals and to prepare for what the future will bring. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellasai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wundery's new podcast, Diss and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the build up, why it happened,

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You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondery app. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode, the Daily Stoked podcast. As you know, I love biographies. My books are often just an amalgamation of things I've learned or stories I've found in other biographies that I've read. I've been a big reader of biographies since I was a kid, but I love biographies. I've read thousands of pages of biographies from Robert Caro, from William Manchester, from Doris Kern's Goodwin. I love really in-depth thick biographies. I love biographies that go not just into the subject, but into the parents, that go not just into the subject, but into the parents, and the environment that made this subject, I love learning the historical trends that influence the people

who influence the person, and sometimes there's just no way better to do that than one of these big, thick 900, or 1000 page biographies. And so, I was really honored this week to talk to someone whose work I've come to relatively recently, but I'm now a huge fan of Andrew Roberts. He's the biographer of Napoleon. He wrote Napoleon a life. He wrote Churchill walking with destiny. More recently, he's published a shorter, more accessible book called Leadership in War, Essential Lessons from those who made history.

And so I talked to Andrew in this week's episode about George Marshall, who's a hero in my book, He Go Is The Enemy. We talk about Kato, sort of the superhero of ancient Stoic thought. We talk a lot about Napoleon. And what would the Stoics have thought of Napoleon? I mean, I think they would have viewed him similarly

to how Marcus Aurelius and Seneca viewed Alexander the Great sort of a mix of fascination, but also disgust and disillusionment. I mean, Napoleon is compellingly as he is portrayed in Andrew Roberts' books, it was ultimately an insatiable conqueror. He, I think, pales in comparison to the greatness of George Washington, as I talk about with Andrew, in that he sought power for its own sake. He allowed himself to be made emperor, Napoleon saw himself the descendant of Caesar far more

than wanting to follow in the noble example of Cato. But I still think they would have been impressed with his ability to organize his ability to accomplish goals, you know, his determination, his perseverance, which is what's so interesting about Alexander the great in the Stoics is that that Seneca quotes and talks about him positively in some respects and negatively in others. Emerson had the same sort of horror and love and hate for Napoleon. I think the Stoics would have been much more in line with Churchill. They would have respected him. They would have admired him. They certainly would have seen flaws in his personality and I think Churchill had some epicurean tendencies

to be sure, but I think there's some similarities in Churchill to Cicero, to Tesseneca, highly ambitious, highly motivated, definitely wanted to be at the center of things, if not at the absolute top of things. And yet, what made Churchill so great, and this is something I think Seneca and Cicero both sort of fell short on, is that he seemed to be, to believe in the cause more than in himself, you know, seems to be, you know, his sort of personal bravery

and courage is unquestionable. Certainly wasn't corrupted by fame and fortune the way that the other two were. So again, I think obviously these characters existed, well, past the sort of heyday of stoicism, but that doesn't mean we can't sort of study them in a similar way that the Stoics would have. And I think that's one of the reasons why I wanted to have Andrew on the show. We even talk about the importance of biography, how one can learn from biographies. I was just reading recently someone was saying that Plutarch is probably the most influential writer who ever lived, because Plutarch's biographies of ancient Roman and Greek figures influenced so many of the most influential people who ever lived, including both Napoleon and Churchill.

And so Andrew is just a fascinating guy. His biography, as we talk about, a Napoleon is a little transgressive, being an Englishman who talks somewhat admiringly of Napoleon. I actually really liked his biography of Margaret Thatcher in Leadership in War, but just a fascinating clever, creative guy, one of probably the best living biographers of our time. He's controversial, he's clever, he's funny, and I got a wonderful accent,

which you will listen to in today's episode. So check this out, listen to it, and then I can't recommend his books, Napoleon, and Churchill, leadership and war strongly enough. Who love them, they will take some time. But now is a great time to be dedicating yourself to big books that you don't normally have time to read. And so let's get into it with Andrew.

Hi Andrew, you know, what I loved about your books would really struck me with them and something I kind of I sort of feel is missed in a lot of modern biographies but but is much more vivid whether you're reading Plutarch or or the sort of ancient biographies is you seem to actually like and be fascinated by the people that you're writing about. Thank you very much. That's kind of you and it's great to be on the show as well, Ryan. I think you've either got to love or hate the person that you're writing about. It's okay to hate them as well, in fact, but you must be emotionally connected to them, because otherwise, if you're living with somebody for three years, in the case of my last Churchill book or six years, it took me to write an Napoleon book and indeed six years for Lord Sulbury as well.

And that is a long time to commit to a person, almost as long as some relationships. And the idea that you can do that and not have an emotional commitment to them is strange, really, I suppose. Right. And I think what comes through to me in your books is not only do you have strong feelings about the person, but you seem to be harkening back more towards an ancient tradition, which is that there's really something to learn from these larger than life figures as opposed to, you know, I can feel like sometimes the biographies are bogged down in minutiae, or they paint such a mixed picture that it's impossible to actually learn anything from the person that you might apply in your actual life. Yes, that's right. I think there's no point in writing about somebody unless he has, he or she has something

a little bit further, a little bit more than the normal to tell you about the human condition. Otherwise, why do it? Right. And so I love leadership in war. It reminds me of Doris Kern Goodwin's book, Leadership and Tribulent Times. It seems like it's a very timely book, what does leadership look like under pressure? And even that's, I think, a little bit ancient too.

I mentioned Plutarch earlier, but what I love about Plutarch is he's like, how can I compare and contrast these figures in a way that allows the reader or a leader to learn something? I feel like you really did that in this book where you're sort of contrasting the good leaders of the 19th and 20th century with the bad leaders of the 19th and 20th century. That's kind of you. I think my books, the Hitler and Churchill and Napoleon and Wellington, try to do that. I mean, I didn't have the classic Plutarchian model in mind. He did

Romans and Greeks, yes, and he didn't. So that would have been, unfortunately, beyond me. But nonetheless, it is interesting to contrast characters. I'm just reading a very good biography or at least book about Oliver Cromwell at the moment and the number of contrasts to being came and Charles I, I think we make a really excellent, sort of in-depth character study of those two men, because they really were polar opposites on so many ways and so many ways. And the other thing, of course,

is that it draws the reader in. I'm not trying to write Grya's dust academic hit. I am trying to write history, which gives people pulls for thought. And so that kind of contrast between people, I think is an interesting way to look at them. And I particularly liked your biography of Marshall. Marshall's been a hero of mine.

Sort of ironic amongst the historical figures because he was so not into self-promotion. He's sort of been given short shift by history, but I just I find him to be sort of the ideal modern statesmen leader and obviously contrast so much with the kinds of leaders that we have right now. Yes, oh undassly. George Marshall was a giant, but he was a courtly Pennsylvania and gentlemen. And to be able to be that,

really I think is pretty extraordinary in an era that, I'm obviously in the 1940s, courtly Pennsylvania and gentlemen were much more the norm, but in an era of leadership, which did throw up, of course, huge characters like Winston Churchill and George Patton, he wasn't like that. Marshall was a much more self-contained figure and all the more impressive for it. And the way in which also

he was capable of dealing with these huge egos like Douglas MacArthur, for example. But at the same time, when he was going to choose somebody for the Supreme Allied commander, he went for somebody who was rather like him, in fact, in Dwight Eisenhower. Yeah, I know that's a great point. I think oftentimes we sort of bimmon the, you know, let's say the ethics

or the temperament of our leaders and, you know, we wish they were more like college professors or we wish they were more like sort of pure and honest and good, but the reality is politics and warfare are very dirty businesses. And I think the great leaders managed to sort of be good, but actually deal in dirty business. And I think that that was unique about Marshall. And also, of course, they're not all morally outstanding individuals. Personally, Marshall was indeed, as was actually in his private life with St Churchill and several of the others, but by and large, that doesn't really ultimately matter in leadership. With leadership, you've got to take the whole person, and if somebody is unfaithful to his wife like David Lloyd

George, it doesn't necessarily mean that he's not going to be a great, war-winning leader like David Lloyd George was. So it's a difficult one, the connection between private morality and public effectiveness. Well, that was something I was gonna ask you. So where do you come down then as a historian who's looked at such a broad swath of history

and having profiled Hitler and Stalin and some of the failed leaders of that period with something we talk about at Daily's Dock, that Herick Lietus had this great expression. He said, you know, character is fate or character is destiny. And so the argument there would be like your personal morality does matter because it's symptomatic of larger character flaws. How do you see character working with and for these larger than my figures that you've written about? Well, I'm afraid my, at least the nine people that I write about leadership in war,

they really do span the gamut. It comes to personal character. You have people like Margaret Thatcher who are morally impeccable. We mentioned George Marshall earlier. But others like Admiral Nelson, who very clearly wasn't. And yet was undoubtedly a great leader. So I'm afraid I'm not really one for Heraclitus' argument

on this score. I think that you can be a complete ship to your wife, the way that David Lloyd George was, for example, he was once asked his terrible story about him, even true one. He was once asked whether or not he was going to be taking Mrs. Lloyd George to the Paris Peace Conference. And he replied, would you take sandwiches to a banquet? Which is a pretty appalling remark to make about one's own wife, but nonetheless, you know, he was the man who won the war. Yeah, and I wonder if maybe it's sort of depends on what your role is in a given situation

in that like, you know, Marshall and Eisenhower both men of very upstanding character, although Eisenhower did cheat on his wife although somewhat understandable when you're trapped in Europe for five consecutive years, I suppose, but the- To my tell you, that's your wife. Right. I just mean, when you look at the character of those two men,

I think, obviously Eisenhower was a good president, Marshall would have been a good president, whereas the character flaws of say, a MacArthur, were well suited when he was contained solely to a singular command, but were you to put him in a position of supreme leadership, you know, perhaps that's when, you know, maybe under that pressure that character flaw would not have continued to be sustainable. Well, exactly. And I think also, although of course, Douglas MacArthur was chief of US Army, chief of staff of the US Army in his time, yes, was also in the Commonwealth. He'd have had to have done three extra things that he didn't really have to do in peace time. The first was to deal with the press and public relations to a much greater degree than any US Army chief of staff had to do in the past.

The second thing of course was to deal with Congress and the president which he did have to do, but nonetheless on a much more intense footing than when he was chief of staff. And the third thing, of course, was trying to integrate with the Allies. And what George Marshall was brilliant at was getting on with people like Winston Churchill and somehow he also managed to get on with General Sraman Brook, the British Chief of Staff who basically had contempt for him as a strategist, not as a man. And Marshall was able to do all of those three things on top of creating strategy and creating an army of 200,000 people and turning into one of 16 millions. You know, it really was as Churchill called in the organizer of victory.

What I love about Marshall is, and I think this is maybe a fourth thing that you'd add to the responsibilities of leadership as you get that higher. Marshall was a cultivator of talent and saw himself more as a servant leader, whereas so when you look at sort of the coaching tree as they call it in sports, of the coaches that come from one's coaching staff, Marshall has a very impressive coaching tree. MacArthur absolutely did not

because he was sort of most for the most part surrounded himself with sycophants he was sort of most for the most part surrounded himself with sick offense or you know was sort of paranoid that people were plotting against him. So to be a leader at that level, you have to have leaders underneath you. And you know, when MacArthur was chief of staff, he punished Marshall. He saw Marshall as a threat. So I think it's also do you have the ego to realize that it's not really about you at that point? Yes, and I think it's fair to say that George Marshall and MacArthur obviously

didn't get on, but it's worthwhile pointing out that Eisenhower did all right under Trump. Arthur out in the Philippines. Oh, he did make the marvelous joke that working for MacArthur in the Philippines told him everything he needed to know about amateur dramatics. Yes. Well, so to go to this idea of character being faint, what I found fascinating about your Napoleon biography is you have somewhat of a contrarian take on Napoleon. You like him and you saw him as a you, you, you like him and you saw him as a, as a, as it's sort of the, the most brilliant man of his age and, and, and I, I could feel coming through the book, your, your admiration for him in many ways. What strikes you about Napoleon? What, why did you decide to write

this book? I think, um, actually, ultimately, it was a sense of humor. He's been accused so often by British historians of being a proto-Hitler figure. And the more that I read about him and thought about him, the more ridiculous ludicrous that is in fact. And one of the things, one of the giveaways was the sense of humor, actually. He was an extremely funny man, which most dictators tend not to be. He was also so bound up with the liberating side of the French Revolution, keeping the best bits of the French Revolution, meritocracy and freedom of religion and equality before the law and so on. The thought that they were all worth proselytizing across Europe.

And of course this had to be done in the ultimately in the sort of baggage train of the French army, but when you look at it closely of those seven wars of the coalitions. Actually, Napoleon only started two of them. The other five were started by different coalitions of allies attempting to crush him and with him the ideas of the French Revolution. So I took, as you say, contrarian line, but what I profoundly believe in that really for years, we've had the historians who were most affected by the Second World War, the historians of the 50s, 60s, 70s, really up to the 90s, all seen Napoleon through a completely false prism,

that of the Fuhrer. And I imagine that's a slightly more transgressive view for you to take as someone who is British. Interestingly, I was trying to think about my prism. When I think about Napoleon, I see it through the American lens. And what strikes me, Americans have also sort of, at that time, sort of had a love hate admiration for Napoleon. I guess when I contrast, you know, Washington with Napoleon, obviously Napoleon's military accomplishments are, you know, incredible compared to Washington, although Washington

did beat the British and Napoleon never did, but that idea of characters, fate comes back to me. I guess, you know, Washington repeatedly renouncing power, Washington sort of having some purpose or vision beyond himself. Maybe that was the one thing that I felt was absent in Napoleon. I was curious what you thought about that. Yes, what it certainly was, of course, absent in the boolean. There was no sense of that since an attice, that a self-abnegation of power, then Napoleon got power. He Jolly were hung onto it in a way that Washington, as you, as you point out, never did, and is the greater man for it. In fact, it was George III, wasn't it, who was told that, that Washington

was going to give up power and said then he will be the greatest man in the world. And when one looks now at Napoleon's legacy and't know, I suppose the Frenchness of Napoleon, to put it in a different way, he was sort of, he was essential to Frenchness in a way that Washington is also, obviously, to have been the important to Americanness. But today, there are large numbers of Frenchmen who denounce Napoleon, whereas I've never met an American who denounces Washington except now you get a slight revisionist aspect over

the slave holding issue and his attitude towards the Native Americans early on in his career. So there is a revisionist aspect, but in France, pretty much the whole of the French left have hated Napoleon and his legacy for nearly 200 years. legacy for nearly 200 years. Do you think, I guess with Napoleon, what maybe was lacking, or I felt was sort of a flaw in him, is that there wasn't that sort of strong internal compass. There was this clear sense of sort of administrative genius, military genius, a sense that the old regime clearly

was not working, but like you know, like, for instance, his decision about slavery, you know, at least Washington seemed to have been more morally conflicted about slavery than Napoleon was, or, you know, Napoleon was... Well hang on, hang on, he did a bullish slavery in 1814, not for very long, of course, but after first reinstating it, right? After reinstating it, yes, no, he flipped flopped on slavery, whereas George Washington didn't do it. Except he...

Only in death, right? In death Washington was the only founder to free his slaves. Yes, yes. It's a bit sort of late, I would have thought. Yeah, that's true. I guess, but it's like Napoleon had this sort of sense of Europe as a set of chess pieces

and what known was better at that than him and could size up personalities. But I was just curious what you thought maybe the animating principle, what was the cause that motivated,? Was it himself or was there some deeper driving force of personal destiny? He believed in his star. Of course he did. And that's one of the driving aspects of the film. But but no, like I really do think it was his recognition in his 20s that which of course is an absolute key time, as I argue in my

leadership in war, but that period in one's early 20s when you look at the world and see where about you are in relation to it and in relation to politics, the general Veltan shoun that you that you take on in your early 20s. And what he took on from the French Revolution which broke out when he was 20 years old was that there was the possibility of a better world, world in which you are not judged your rank and status in society is not judged on the basis of what your grandfather and father did. That really is something of the 26 marshals of the French empire created by Napoleon, half of them, whether sons of personal servants and barrel coopers and inkeepers and so on.

People who've never, in a million years, been able in their own lifetimes to become princes and jukes. And that really was a liberating spirit for Europe in those days. And maybe Napoleon's almost disadvantaged by the fact that that seems in retrospect to be so obvious, so preposterous that he's actually fully is that fully given credit for that's right.

No, no, no, absolutely right. You I mean, it doesn't it doesn't strike us as revolutionary truly revolutionary to do that. But imagine if for a thousand years, you had not been able to go up or down in society. And then suddenly, the son of a boot black can become king of Sweden. I mean, that really is an incredibly incredible thing. And it could only have been done. Had the French Revolution just ripped up the rules. And Napoleon was a great one for appointing people

regardless of their background. I mean, this is interesting because he was actually himself a bit of a snob, you know, he came from an aristocratic, although poverty stricter nonetheless in horsey terms, aristocratic background. You know, he liked gentlemen and the son of gentlemen, so on, but he would also appoint Mathena and Neh and Bernadotte, who came from absolutely nowhere, who came from the working classes of French society. So to connect to, obviously, Stoicism, which is what we talk about in my work the most,

I was fascinated by something Napoleon talks about several times and you spend a great deal of time discussing in the book Which was his ability he talks about the sort of the life the life long effort it had been for him to contain his emotions To sort of not be scared in battle not to react not to be scared Can you walk me through the sort of work he did on himself to be so self-contained? Yes, I think it started when he was an officer in the army where, of course, you can't show fear, and especially in that kind of fighting that he started with where, you know, he was on the front line at the Toulon, the cannonballs sort of fudded around him.

And he had to be for his men, fearless, or see-me-it. And then you get him obviously taking part in 60 battles, not always on the front line, of course, the more important he became, especially once he was emperor, the further back, it was important that he be. However, he was still being mildly wounded, but not badly wounded, the battle of Rassisbar in 1809, when he's been emperor for four years. So he's somebody who shows tremendous courage, but also he was able to compartmentalize his mind, which I think is quite a stoic capacity to have, whereby he, whatever was going on at the time, he would be able to twitch his mind off and think about something

else if he needed to. So even in the ashes of Burnt Mosco, he was able, in the Cremlin, to sit down and write the rules for a girls school that he wanted to set up in Sandinie just outside Paris. And when just before the night, before the Battle of Boradino, which was going to be the bloodiest battle in the whole history of mankind up until that point. He wrote the regulations for the comedy François. This is an extraordinary and indeed wrote to the prefect of Genoa, telling him to stop taking his mistress to the opera. This is a really extraordinary capacity to compartmentalize his mind. And he says in 1814 that he's got to really, if he's going to take major decisions,

he's got to be able to cut out all human emotion. And that's an extraordinary thing for a leader to admit. But I think it's probably true for some of the really truly great ones that they can't allow ordinary human emotion to plow their dodgements, and they have to take it entirely on the merits and the basis of the case, and Napoleon was very good at doing that. My last question, and I told you I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Kato, and you said you didn't know much about him, but actually I learned quite a bit about him in your Napoleon book.

I'm in the middle of writing a book called Lives of the Stoics. That's a series of biographies of the great Stoke from history. And I didn't know that Napoleon had one that he had Kato in his hall of heroes, so to speak at his French estate. What is it, the Tolaries? How do you pronounce that? The Tolarie Palace. Yeah, he had a statue of Kato there. But I guess in his book on Julius Caesar,

he talked about how Kato had decided to kill himself, rather than live under the tyranny of Julius Caesar. And I thought I was fascinating that Napoleon had this sort of counter, this sort of very real politic, pragmatic argument. He was like, who did Kato help by committing suicide? Certainly didn't help his cause. He only helped Julius Caesar.

I just thought it was fascinating that he had looked at these still-ic figures from history and sort of ran it through his very Napoleonic lens. And it really, I don't know, I just thought that was one of the most fascinating footnotes in your whole book. The ancients mattered enormously to him. He read about them. He wrote, of course, a biography of Julius Caesar when he was on St. Helena, which actually when you look into it carefully is a, it's pretty much a translation of the regantic wars rather than through biography, but nonetheless, you know, that's what he decided he was going to do when he knew he wasn't going to get off since Alina and for most of his time on Alina, he knew that he was dying of cancer.

And that's what he thought would be a useful way to spend his time. He used to read the ancients when his father had a good library on Corsica. He also, when he was on Elham, he used to read the ancient, and he took books, including Caesar on campaigns with him in the great campaigns.

So yes, this is a man who, I mean, all of that society, of course, educated society did read the ancients, but for Napoleon, he took it almost as a sort of, you know, manual for himself, for his career and for his rule. Yeah, and it struck me as both illustrative and revealing, and I'd be curious for your thoughts. It's like sort of Cato almost universally throughout history, but then particularly in that

enlightenment period. I mean, Washington's hero is Cato. Some of the great lines from the American Revolution, give me liberty or give me death. I regret I only have one life to give to my country. These come from Addison's play about Cato. I don't know, it just struck me a strange, like Napoleon living in that same time to have a negative take on Cato for sort of dying on

principle. Is that sort of revealing about maybe what fundamentally animated Napoleon in your view? Yeah, so I mean Napoleon did consider suicide on a couple of occasions. he tried it once, possibly twice, in April 1814, he took poison. That was sooner than living in a sort of post-mapleonic Europe. So in that sense, he did follow Kato's leadership, but of course, he he survived and then went on to live on St. Lina. He did think that suicide was a perfectly reasonable way to deal with dishonor, but I think he liked Kato had so much pride. I'm not sure that these these great Roman suicides were down to a belief in political systems so much as a tremendous sense that you don't want to be captured and in some cases of

course with the Romans actually displayed in cages, for your enemy, you mustn't be paraded. One thinks of King Mithridates III as so many others who just can't bear the humiliation of being paraded in the triumph of one's enemy. And that's a much more powerful sense. When Napoleon, on the other hand, thought that he was going to be able to be given a country house in the home counties of England and live as a gentleman.

And when it became clear that that wasn't the case, he was infuriating. Yeah, it was almost, that belief struck me as so naive that you would be the moral enemy of a country and then they would somehow not treat it as just a game, that they'd welcome him to England with open arms. That's right. It's just the aftertaste. Some hundred thousand people had either been killed or wounded in the various struggles and battles between Isiske from Elber and him getting on the boat to St. Helena.

And I guess ultimately not having read it, but Glantz, what you talked about, I think in the sort of battle of the Republican forces and the Caesarian forces that what turns Rome from a republic to an empire, it seems like ultimately, Napoleon was sort of a fan of Julius Caesar and Julius Caesar himself, didn't mind trading tens or hundreds of thousands of lives if it got him what he wanted. And maybe that's ultimately, you know, the darker side of Napoleon. No, no, no, I take issue with you there. I don't really don't believe that. I don't think, I can't see an instance in which he traded thousands of lives for anything for his own glory.

I think that he obviously as a commander, especially as a huge commander like the invasion of Russia, for example, tens of thousands of people died, but that's a huge difference between assuming that his motivation was primarily for his own glorification. I don't think it was in the slightest. Well, though, do you think he could have stayed and not escaped after his first exile? No, his first exile, the one to Elba, unfortunately, as he actually landed, the allies who were all in Vienna at the time at their Congress declared him an outlaw and mobilized their armies to invade France. So there was no question of him being able to, he wanted to just be allowed to stay as

Emperor of France. He was open to negotiations and discussions, but they had an army of 150,000 Austrians, 350,000 Russians, and the British and the Prussians all converging on France to overthrow him. But if he'd stayed in Elba, that wouldn't have happened. I mean, he was willing to trade hundreds of thousands or many thousands of lives to try to retake France. Well, he was hoping that because the Bourbon's was so unpopular by then, he was going to be acclaimed, which he was, and that he was then going to be able to do a deal in which tens or hundreds of thousands of Allied lights weren't going to be lost. So that, I don't think holds up as some kind

of a moral failing of his. When you talk about Julius Caesar,ley or absolutely right, I mean, when one looks at the eagles that he put on the standards, the choice of the Senate as being the upper house of the French legislature, of his own taking on the imperial position, calling himself Del Vempran. That's all very much out of the Tazarian rule book, although of course Julius Caesar didn't call himself emperor, because it was all intents and verbs is the first emperor of Rome. Sure, no, and look, I found the book fascinating, and I think ultimately what makes it so great

and why I think reading biography is important is that your book raises these questions and puts them up for us to think about in way. It's not just where was this person born? What did they do? It's the great lives sort of put forth these great complicated questions that history repeats over and over and over again. That's right. And I think that's why it's important to remember that the great man or great woman view of history, which has been so derided in academia over the last half-century or also, actually does have a valid reason for its existence. The Marxist view, the

Webe view of history, the determinists who argue in T.S. Eliot's words that history is just vast in personal forces is right to an extent of course it is, but actually unless one works out what's going through Napoleon's mind in 1812, or indeed Adolf Hitler's mind in 1941, you can't explain the invasion of Russia in both of those cases. And so it is important to Winston Churchill's mind in 1940 when he got the British people to fight on against Hitler. These are key moments where individuals really do matter, and therefore, in my view, it's worth studying. No, and we didn't even get to talk about Churchill,

but in a way that's kind of the theme of all your books, it feels like, as you pick individuals who individually changed history, and yes, they're larger than life. And yes, they're virtues and vices are greater than many of ours. But at the same time, they were just ordinary people. When Sincercho had to write books for a living and Napoleon, as you say, began and started his life,

sweating about legal matters regarding his inheritance. And that even from all that smallness can come enormous impact on not just people alive in the moment, but for generations and generations afterwards. Good to know about it better myself. And to me, the ultimate disproving of the attack against the great-manifestory theory I saw on an internet meme is for anyone who believes that an individual can change history, let me tell you about a person who ate a bat in China about six months ago. Absolutely. Yeah, that's very good. But I tell you what, before we go, can I,

speak of that, speaking of the hero of Arras, Christ. Yes. And I just read one paragraph, just a couple of sentences from the speech that Churchill gave to the Royal College of Physicians. It is. March 1944, which I have in front of me in

which I think is very interesting and useful, but when people say that it's not a war that we're fighting against coronavirus, I think that Churchill would very much think that it is. And the reason for that is this paragraph from the speech he made. The discoveries of healing science must be the inheritance of all. That is clear. disease must be attacked, whether it occurs in the poorest or the richest man or woman, simply on the ground that it is the enemy. And it must be attacked just in the same way as the far brigade will give its full assistance

to the humblest cottage as readily as to the most important mansion. That's beautiful. And as always, Churchill seems both timeless and ahead of his time. Thank you very much indeed, Ryan. It's been great being on the show. I appreciate it. Thanks. Hey, everyone. Great news.

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