BATTLES THAT CHANGED HISTORY AN INTERVIEW WITH SIR TONY ROBINSON
Tony Robinson is an award-winning writer, presenter and actor who is the UK’s foremost face of popular history. His highly varied career and long-standing interest in history has helped to popularise the subject for decades.
He has now written the foreword to DK’s new book, Battles That Changed History: An Illustrated Guide To The World’s Most Famous Battles From Antiquity To The Cold War And Beyond. To coincide with the publication, he discussed with us the importance of military history, how it is commonly presented on television and in media, and the centenary of the end of World War I.
THE IMPACT OF WARFARE ON THE WORLD
To what extent do battles change history?
It’s always a moot point about how things are changed in history. We always have this notion of ‘causation’: that one event occurs and then everything else must happen. For example, if Franz Ferdinand had worn a bulletproof jacket then World War I wouldn’t have happened.
Nevertheless, the reality is that an awful lot of nations are made out of wars in general and battles in particular. It is clearly true that battles shaped empires, and it’s also true that the enmities created by them last
