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Roberts’ ‘sympathetic’ biography of King George III wins Elizabeth Longford Prize
Andrew Roberts’ George III: The Life and Reign of Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch has won the 2022 Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography.
The biography, published by Allen Lane, was praised by chair of judges Roy Forster for “robustly grappling with the key crises of King George III’s reign” while “painstakingly tracking the monarch’s close control of governmental and political decision-making", as well as painting a portrait that is “unexpected, sympathetic and tragically shadowed by mental illness".
“[Mental illness] is one of the many subjects authoritatively reinterpreted in a book which, while grand in scale, is written with the author’s characteristic brio and full of surprises,” Forster said. “ In a strong and varied field of contenders, the judges awarded the 2022 Prize to Roberts’ study of ‘Britain’s most misunderstood monarch’ for its combination of archival research, historical acumen, psychological insight and unfailing readability: the keynotes of historical biography as practised by Elizabeth Longford.”
The prize was founded in 2003 by Flora Fraser and Peter Soros to commemorate Elizabeth Longford, British historian and biographer, by celebrating each year a historical biography which, like hers, “combines scholarship and narrative drive.”
At a reception on Monday 13th June at the home of Flora Fraser, chair of the Prize, Roberts was presented with a cheque for £5,000 and a bound copy of Elizabeth Longford’s memoir, The Pebbled Shore (W&N).
Roberts is currently visiting professor at the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London, and the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His previous books include Salisbury: Victorian Titan (winner of the Wolfson Prize for History), Napoleon the Great (winner of the Grand Prix of the Fondation Napoléon) and Churchill: Walking with Destiny (2018).
