three of the most accomplished historians of our time,

or any time.

Neil Ferguson, Victor Davis Hansen,

and Andrew Roberts on Uncommon Knowledge Now.

Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. A native of Glasgow, Sir Neil Ferguson holds BA and Defill degrees in history from Moddlin College, Oxford. Now a fellow at the Hoover Institution here at Stanford. Sir Neil has published well over a dozen major works of history from his classic study of the First World War,

the pity of war, to doom the politics of catastrophe. He is currently working, or so we

are led to believe, on his second volume of his life of Henry Kissinger. You are at work on

it, are you not?

When not being interviewed by you, Peter.

Thank you. The classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hansen grew up on a ranch in the San Joaquin

Valley of California, then earned his undergraduate degree at UC Santa Cruz and his doctorate

in classics right here at Stanford University.

Currently again, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, Professor Hansen, is himself the author of more than a dozen major works of history, including his definitive study of the Peloponnesian War, a war like no other. A native of London, Andrew Roberts, the Baron Roberts of Belgravia, holds undergraduate and doctoral degrees from

Gonville and Key's College, Cambridge.

After a brief career in investment banking, imagine what you'd be if you'd stuck with

it, Andrew.

And broke.

Oh, really?

That bad.

I was totally used for some.

All right.

After a brief career in investment banking, Lord Roberts turned to the writing of history,

...