Excellent biography of a man who was one of the top historians.
However, his ego, his disdain for some colleagues, and a certain
"so-called" diary led to his down fall. ( )

H T-R ignited a more burning hatred in people that did not like him than they felt for Hitler. This excellent biography explains why.
I first heard of H T-R in 1987 when I read “Selling Hitler” by Robert Harris – a purchase of the Saunders St Book Club. H T-R, then known as Lord Dacre, was the muggins who authenticated the Hitler Diaries. But after he died I read an extraordinary book published by his literary executor Blair Worden on Sir Theodore de Mayerne, Europe’s physician. I knew nothing of Hermes Trismegistus or Galen and all was explained.
Adam Sisman’s 2010 biography of H T-R was out of print when I tried to order it in 2016. But I borrowed a copy through the inter library loans which allowed a good few months for reading. It was mildly diverting, until page 116 when I sat up. H T-R was so loathed and reviled by two intelligence officer superiors during the War that they accused him of high treason in betraying the Bletchley Park Ultra decoding secret (cf Alan Turing) to the Germans, when H T-R went on a fox-hunting holiday to Ireland in 1943. Sisman dismisses these accusers and deranged, petty and vindictive, but the accusation points to a really unusual degree of malice.
Professor Habakkuk the economic historian wrote in 1952: “I find it difficult to understand whether T-R is a fundamentally nice person in the grip of a prose style in which it is impossible to be polite, or a fundamentally unpleasant person…using rudeness as a disguise for nastiness”.
Three generations of Waugh’s returned nastiness for 30 years, starting with Evelyn, continuing with Auberon and extending even to a granddaughter who abused her position at The Times to cast aspersions on T-R’s scholarship.
T-R got his comeuppance with the Hitler diaries scandal – but this is a tiny part of a book that encourages one to read T-R – on the Scottish Enlightenment, on the Gentry and on Hitler (his famous Last Days of Hitler is not in local libraries.) ( )

I am in some ways "the ideal reader" for this biography: an Anglophile and a British Historian, as well as someone with a considerable interest in mid-20th century intellectual history. I was in graduate school in the 1980s, and I was aware at the time of several of main skirmishes and battles fought between Trevor-Roper and his intellectual peers over the course of several earlier decades. Reading this book now, I can put them into perspective more much clearly than I could at the time, so that now I can perceive nuances and shades of conflict that were undecipherable at the time. There's a lot of great "back-story" in Sisman's biography: of course, it helps to be already somewhat familiar with what the "front-story" was. (I'm thinking in particular about matters involving Trevor-Roper's well-known public feud with Evelyn Waugh, but it also pertains to his engagement with rival historians and "frenemies" like Lawrence Stone, Keith Thomas, and A.J.P Taylor.)

Other reviewers have commented on the considerable length of Sisman's text: 575 pages. Really, the length is justified by Sisman's "mission" to maintain and defend Trevor-Roper's professional reputation. In the last decades of his life, Trevor-Roper made a series of unfortunate decisions that tarnished the name he had earned for himself with his careful and probing work in the earlier part of his historical career. He accepted the Mastership of Peterhouse College, Cambridge, a position for which he was unsuited and which proved to be in his own words "seven wasted years"; he maintained his association with the "Times" newspaper concern long after Rupert Murdoch took it over, when it was clear to outsiders that Murdoch was using Trevor-Roper's prestige as a cover for his own union-busting policies; and most notoriously, he lent his name, position, and expertise to the doomed effort to pass off the supposed Hitler Diaries as genuine. Sisman does succeed in presenting a good case that Trevor-Roper should be remembered not for these later mis-steps, but rather for his earlier sterling work, especially for "The Last Days of Hitler" which is just as interesting and readable today as if was when published nearly 70 years ago. ( )

Thank you for telling us about this extraordinary human being who was Hugh Trevor-Roper. ( )

This is a superlative biography of one of Britain’s foremost historians. Hugh Trevor-Roper, the son of a country doctor, rose through public school (Charterhouse) to Christ Church College Oxford University where he eventually became Regius Professor of Modern History, a post he held for twenty-three years. At the age of sixty-six, at a time others may have contemplated taking things a little easier he accepted the post of Master of Peterhouse, University of Cambridge.

No stranger to controversy and conflict, and with a particular fondness for gossip, the more malicious the better, Hugh Trevor-Roper upset a lot of people during his career. Other historians, in particular, were the target of his spite and malice. It would be very easy to label him as a ‘social-climber’, he so easily made friends, or at least good acquaintances, with the wealthy and the titled. Indeed he married into the aristocracy, albeit to a woman with whom he had little in common – she was far more interested in haute couture, fashionable interiors and holidays than pursuing intellectual interests. Their relationship was to cause the Professor as much grief as it did joy.

However Adam Sisman has given an extremely balanced account of Hugh Trevor- Ropers life – he did have many, many redeeming qualities. Although his childhood had been a rather emotionless one, his mother cuts a rather austere, cold figure, he eventually became good friends with his step children, the offspring of his wife’s first marriage, taking on the role of an affectionate father-figure.

Perhaps the saddest thing about Hugh Trevor-Roper is that he did not get down to writing ‘the big one’ – the book that would have made his reputation. At the beginning of his career his writing was often favourably compared with that of Gibbon - praise indeed for any young historian – yet that potential was never quite fulfilled. He chose instead to spend much of his time and talent on working on newspaper and magazine articles because, one can only conclude, they paid well.

Sisman has written one of the best biographies I have had the pleasure to read. Even if the reader has little interest in Hugh Trevor-Roper per se, this book gives a marvellous flavour of academic life in the middle years of the twentieth century. Very highly recommended. ( )