Throughout history, great and terrible events have often hinged on sheer luck. Now, award-winning historian Andrew Roberts has assembled a team of his prominent colleagues, asking them to consider what might have happened if major world events had gone differently. Concentrating on their areas of expertise, distinguished historians re-imagine vital moments in history. George W. Bush’s former White House adviser, David Frum, considers a President Gore response to 9/11, while Conrad Black wonders how the U.S. might have entered World War II if the Japanese had not bombed Pearl Harbor. Whether it’s Stalin fleeing Moscow in 1941, as envisioned by Simon Sebag Montefiore, or Napoleon not being forced to retreat from it in 1812, as pictured by Adam Zamoyski, these essays posit a fascinating, sometimes horrifying parallel universe.
Andrew Roberts, 40, might not have got into Cambridge if the head of history at Caius College had not been amused by why he was chucked out of school. His books would not have been written if Roberts had been even half-way competent at his initial career choice, merchant banking. So he would not have won the Wolfson and James Stern Silver Pen prizes, nor would have become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. More troubling to him still, if he had not sat next to the biographer Leonie Frieda in the Poissonerie restaurant in Sloane Avenue, she might not be his girlfriend today.