‘It is … richly evidenced and scrupulously argued. And, coming after his powerful studies of Halifax, Salisbury, Napoleon and Churchill, it consolidates Roberts’s position as one of the greatest biographers in the English language today.’
Sir Noel Malcolm, Daily Telegraph
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/george-iii-despot-must-mad-model-king/
‘This mammoth, elegant and splendidly researched biography’
Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/george-iii-by-andrew-roberts-review-3ts299wjs
‘Such is Roberts’s persuasive interpretation, supported by a wide range of sources and argued with keen insight into political realities. … It must be hoped that Andrew Roberts’s important, serious and timely book plays an appropriate role in the rethinking that can now hardly be avoided.’
Jonathan Clark, Times Literary Supplement
George III by Andrew Roberts book review – The TLS (the-tls.co.uk)
‘Andrew Roberts is our most prodigious biographer. … His demolition of the authors of the Declaration’s case against George III is elegant and comprehensive.’
Dominic Lawson, Daily Mail
George III is often portrayed as a wicked tyrant, but a historian insists the myths are wrong | Daily Mail Online
‘Magisterial … George III is notorious for two reasons: losing America and going mad. Roberts provides a fresh and spirited account of both occurrences. … Roberts’s fundamentally humane approach to his biographical subjects … treats George III with as much respect and compassion when sick, blind and deaf as when powerful at the promising start of his reign. The result is a lengthy book that remains engaging throughout.’
Ruth Scurr, The Times
George III by Andrew Roberts review — in defence of a ‘misunderstood monarch’ | Times2 | The Times
‘Deeply researched, it ranges with equal authority from his private life to the military history of the American War of Independence; its tenacious fairness towards its subject gives in the sort of polemical edge that one finds in revisionist history at its best.’
Sir Noel Malcolm, Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year
‘No prisoners are taken, as one detractor after another is skewered. … Roberts’s account is masterly, combining a compelling narrative – one has to keep turning the pages even though one knows the outcome – with analysis that is both cogent and incisive. He appears to have read everything that is in the mainstream and much that isn’t, including a wide range of archival sources. … [George III] has had to wait two centuries for rehabilitation, but it has come at last. Roberts has got deep inside George and his world and has found a man of many sterling qualities. … this tremendous book.’
Tim Blanning, Literary Review
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-king-who-lost-america
‘Welcome this book by Roberts. As his outstanding books on Halifax, Salisbury and Churchill also demonstrate, he is a master of the biography. … Roberts systematically, cogently and helpfully reinterprets his subject’s role and reputation.’
Jeremy Black, History Today
https://www.historytoday.com/history-today-issues/volume-71-issue-11-november-2021
‘This superb royal biography … A book so diligently researched cannot fail to be rich in curious detail and amusing turns of phrase. There are plums on almost every page.’
Hamish Robinson, The Oldie
‘Roberts harnesses a truly extraordinary amount of archival information to offer a comprehensive grasp of a rather tragic, thoroughly misunderstood king.’
Lindsay Chervinksy, Financial Times
George III by Andrew Roberts — not so mad after all | Financial Times
‘Andrew Roberts’s mighty Life, drawing on masses of unseen papers … turns on its head the lazy idea of George III as a tyrant halfwit; in fact, he was probably our most cultured monarch.’
Iona McLaren, Daily Telegraph Books of the Year
PressReader.com – Digital Newspaper & Magazine Subscriptions
‘This is a compendious product of intricate investigation. … It is a magnificent achievement.’
Kate Maltby, Spectator
Has George III been seriously maligned? – The Spectator World
‘This outstanding new biography of George III is timely…. Today, 260 years on, George has found a true champion in Andrew Roberts, who has ridden up gallantly to challenge unfounded prejudice, unhorse mendacious detractors and skewer hoary myths. … This impressively researched and scholarly account of the King’s life and travails is compulsively readable and, in its tragic end, deeply moving. It is full of fascinating detail, insightful vignettes and vivid local colour.’
Adam Zamoyski, The Critic
An Enlightenment king vindicated | Adam Zamoyski | The Critic Magazine
‘Roberts has written a handsome and thorough biography that focuses of the political and domestic sides of the king’s life … But above all Roberts has written a superlative political history of the period between 1760 and 1809.’
Simon Heffer, The New Criterion
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/11/mad-about-george
‘A new biography from Andrew Roberts comes with certain guarantees. It will be beautifully written with sincerity, wit and compassion. It will also take ‘facts that everyone knows’ about his topic and subject them to forensic analysis that sees myths exploding in all directions. … [George III] deserves a sympathetic hearing, and the fair and balanced writing of Andrew Roberts has produced exactly that.’
John Lee, Mars & Clio
‘Brilliantly written, this George comes from one of our finest biographers. Andrew has all the skills of the novelist, notably plot, characterisation and the deft depiction of setting and palletting of ambience, but he adds the truth of occasion and a judgment fixed in more than the convenience and conceit of a storyteller who can arrange his fictional pieces. … We have here, history as literature and literature as history.’
Jeremy Black, Aspects of History Books of the Year
https://aspectsofhistory.com/books-of-2021/
‘Incapable of writing a dull sentence, Roberts deploys deep scholarship and impeccable analysis to exonerate the ‘Farmer’ King of both stupidity and tyranny.’
Saul David, Aspects of History Books of the Year
https://aspectsofhistory.com/books-of-2021/
‘For its breadth of scholarship, argument and sheer enjoyment my Biography of the Year is George III, by Andrew Roberts.’
Richard Foreman, Aspects of History Books of the Year
https://aspectsofhistory.com/books-of-2021/
‘Andrew Roberts’s George III is a wonderful revisionist portrayal of the monarch who presided over the high point of architecture and the loss of America. Obviously meticulously, majestically done – but also a total joy to read.’
Catherine Ostler, Aspects of History Books of the Year
https://aspectsofhistory.com/books-of-2021/
‘The book which impressed me most, and which I most enjoyed, this year is Andrew Roberts’s George III. It is based on such astonishingly wide-ranging and original research that I felt I was reading about the period for the first time. Unknown facts and wonderful anecdotes had me turning the pages with a curiosity I seldom feel when reading about supposedly familiar events. Andrew Roberts is remarkably even-handed, and there is no special pleading on behalf of this genuinely misunderstood and wilfully misrepresented monarch’
Adam Zamoyski, Aspects of History Books of the Year
https://aspectsofhistory.com/books-of-2021/
‘In this mammoth and meticulous biography, Andrew Roberts presents a compelling case for the defence of George III.’
The Week Book of the Week
Book of the week: George III by Andrew Roberts | The Week UK
‘A stout Tory defence of a much misunderstood king, based heavily on unpublished correspondence.’
The Economist Best Books of the Year 2021
‘Roberts’s excellent book makes a convincing case against the exaggerated, unjust version of George III that has been passed down in history. He left this reader in full admiration for George, the noble king.’
Jamie Colvin, Perspective
https://perspectivemag.co.uk/category/arts-and-culture/
‘Andrew Roberts makes a strong revisionist case for the generally maligned George III in this engrossing, brilliant biography, and it is one I am largely persuaded by. … Roberts demonstrates, article by article, that virtually all the famous charges against “the tyrant” George III in the American Declaration of Independence were fictitious.’
Andrew Adonis, Prospect Magazine
Why George III was a misunderstood monarch – Prospect Magazine
‘No other writer, except possibly Alan Bennett, has set out to make us love King George more. Or admire him more. What makes Roberts’s massive biographies so distinctively rewarding is that he provides the reader with enough evidence to undermine his own conclusions.
Ferdinand Mount, The London Review of Books
Ferdinand Mount · No Innovations in My Time: George III · LRB 16 December 2021
‘Andrew Roberts’s George III biography, The Last King of America (Viking, $40), an outstanding and surprisingly moving portrait of a misunderstood king, distinguished by refreshing revisionism but also illuminated by deep humanity.’
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Spectator Books of the Year
https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/books-of-the-year-2021/
‘George III is the author’s masterpiece. His biography teems with detail, ideas and elegance. Roberts is a great writer – and this is one of his greatest achievements. Roberts sets himself a goal, that of challenging or overturning certain misconceptions that we might harbour about his subject. That George III was a tyrant, unintelligent and a victim of porphyria. Suffice to say, Roberts achieves his goal: mission impossible turns into mission accomplished.’
Richard Foreman, Aspects of History
https://aspectsofhistory.com/book_reviews/george-iii-by-andrew-roberts/
‘In this magisterial life of George III, Roberts burnishes his stellar reputation as biographer and historian, dismantling many of the myths that have beset the [King’s] memory …. Roberts marshals the evidence meticulously and persuasively … Now at the top of his game, he has not surrendered the irreverent, revisionist tone that has made him one of the most important public intellectuals of our times.’
Matthew d’Ancona, Tortoise Media
Prince of the city – Tortoise (tortoisemedia.com)
‘The strength of this generous new biography is that it correctly portrays George III as a dedicated, benevolent ruler … Andrew Roberts’ new book achieves this handsomely.’
John Martin Robinson, Country Life
‘Andrew Roberts has built a reputation as perhaps the principal historical biographer of our times. His work often contains a central principle: the identification of important yet misunderstood leaders.’
Angus Gillan, The Mallard
Andrew Roberts: George III was Britain’s most Misunderstood Monarch – The Mallard (mallarduk.com)
‘A powerful reappraisal of the man as well as the king.’
Michael Murphy, Irish Post
Tricky Sell: Historian tours US to repair the reputation of ‘America’s last king’ | The Irish Post
‘Welcome this work by Roberts. As his outstanding books on Halifax, Salisbury and Churchill amply demonstrate, he is a master of the biography … It is an important contribution.’
Jeremy Black, History Today
Role Remodel | History Today
“Roberts is in a rich vein of form at present; after bestselling books on Napoleon and Churchill, yet another masterpiece has tumbled from his pen.”
Dan Jones, The Good Web Guide
https://www.thegoodwebguide.co.uk/lifestyle/whats-on-online/2021s-best-books-of-the-year/22531