John Morris Roberts

John Morris Roberts (14 April 1928 – 30 May 2003) was a British historian with many published works. From 1979 to 1985, he was vice chancellor of the University of Southampton, and from 1985 to 1994, he was warden of Merton College, Oxford. He also wrote and presented the BBC TV series The Triumph of the West, first broadcast in 1985.

Biography Roberts was born in Bath, the son of a department store worker and educated at Taunton School. He won a scholarship to Keble College, Oxford, and took a first in Modern History in 1948. After National Service, he was elected a prize fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he completed a doctoral thesis on the Italian republic set up during the time of Napoleon Bonaparte.

In 1953 Roberts was elected a fellow and tutor in Modern History at Merton College, Oxford, and in the same year, he went as a Commonwealth Fund fellow to Princeton and Yale, where his interests broadened beyond European history. He returned to America three times as a visiting professor in the 1960s. In 1964 Roberts lectured for the British Council in India, and from 1966 to 1977 Roberts served as joint editor of the English Historical Review. The Times Literary Supplement described Roberts as "master of the broad brush-stroke", and in 1985 Roberts wrote and presented the thirteen-part BBC television series The Triumph of the West, a series about the evolution, shaping, and global impacts of Western Civilization, in which painted a broad canvas but avoided simplistic solutions, encouraging the audience to think and reach its own conclusions.

Roberts died in 2003, at Roadwater, Somerset, shortly after completing the fourth revised edition of The New History of the World.

Legacy The John Roberts Memorial Fund was established in his honour at Merton College in 2003, with the aim of increasing the financial support available to undergraduate and graduate students. The college hoped that the first recipient would be a history graduate.

When Roberts' The Mythology of the Secret Societies was republished in 2008, the back cover contained the following message: "We are living at a time when conspiracy theories are rife and the notion of secret plans for world domination under the guise of religious cults or secret societies is perhaps considered more seriously than ever."

Personal life On 10 September 1960, at Milton Abbas, Roberts married (Mariabella) Rosalind Gardiner. The marriage was dissolved in 1964. At Oxford on 29 August 1964 Roberts married Judith Cecilia Mary Armitage, a schoolteacher, and they had one son and two daughters.

Selected works Europe: 1880–1945 (London: Longmans, 1967. 2nd corrected and revised edition, 1970. 3rd edition, 2000 ) The Mythology of the Secret Societies (1972; reprint edition, Watkins, 2008 ) History of the World (New York: Knopf, 1976). Revolution and Improvement: The Western World, 1775–1847 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976). The French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). An Illustrated World History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980. 8 volumes) The Age of Upheaval: The World since 1914 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981). The Triumph of the West: The Origin, Rise, and Legacy of Western Civilization (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1985). A Short History of the World (1993). A History of Europe (New York: 1996). The Age of Diverging Traditions (London: Time-Life, 1998). The Age of Revolution (London: Time-Life, 1998). Eastern Asia and Classical Greece (London: Time-Life, 1998). The Penguin History of the Twentieth Century (1999). Twentieth Century: A History of the World From 1901 to the Present (London: Allen Lane, 1999). The New History of the World (6th Edition, 2013 )