An Old Collegian

"The lives of these old collegians should be writ briefly," Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote (in the seventeenth-century guise of his nom-de-plume Mercurius Oxoniensis); "theirs are vegetable virtues, to be distilled, not dilated." This is generally true, but it is right that an exception has now been made for Trevor-Roper himself. He was an Oxford historian of great distinction who aroused strong loyalty among his friends as well as strong dislike in the many people whom he offended. There was much predictable obloquy when in 1983, as a longstanding expert on the wartime years of Adolf Hitler, he hastily and inadvisedly "authenticated" a cache of forged "Hitler diaries." It was a major and very public blunder that showed poor judgment, and his dignified apology was inevitably disregarded. Adam Sisman's substantial biography, based on a large archive of his subject's papers, sets the blunder of the Hitler incident into perspective, for Sisman sees it as a regrettable and uncharacteristic lapse in a distinguished career.

There is certainly much to be written about, and Sisman has organized his material well. Sisman began his own literary life as an academic publisher; then he wrote the first biography of Trevor-Roper's Oxford rival, A. J. P. Taylor (1994). It may, however, have been a well-turned study of Dr. Johnson's biographer James Boswell (2000) that confirmed the elderly Trevor-Roper's high opinion and led him to invite Sisman to undertake his biography. Sisman has handled the copious materials deftly, leaving the reader with no sense of overstretching documentary sources for this full but well-proportioned biography.

Trevor-Roper's career had many unexpected twists, from the time of his prizewinning undergraduate course when he realized halfway through that he had seen enough of Latin and Greek and changed to modern history, taking high honors in his new subject. After a wartime career in intelligence he was offered the chance of investigating the circumstances of Hitler's death, which not only gave the young historian of seventeenth-century England a prominent literary opportunity but would establish him also as an authority on Nazi Germany and (once the archives had been released) on the history of wartime secret-service work. In the late 1960s he moved again, away from the English seventeenth century into the history of European thought. Throughout his career a taste for controversy had marked him as a dangerous opponent. One early public debate had been on the early history of Roman Catholic dissent in Protestant England, for which Catholic apologists engaged Evelyn Waugh in their cause. Sensing a small victory, Waugh opined in 1954 that "one course is open to Mr Trevor-Roper. He should change his name and seek a livelihood at Cambridge." Trevor-Roper, by then ennobled as Lord Dacre, recalled this advice a quarter of a century later when he moved from his Oxford chair to take up the mastership of the oldest college in Cambridge. He had been invited to Peterhouse by a group of high Tory fellows who apparently believed him to be of their party. In fact he was more of a Whig, a pragmatic Liberal, and seven years of acidulous controversy were the result. By the time he retired in 1987 he had scored some notable victories, but it was significant that he moved back to live once more within comfortable reach of Oxford.

Colleagues frequently regretted Trevor-Roper's failure to produce the large-scale studies of seventeenth-century English history which had been hoped for early in his career but were never completed. Big books had been attempted, and several substantial typescripts still survive, but his highly self-critical nature seems never to have been satisfied with them. It is probable that he found none of them good enough for his own exacting standards. Significant parts of the larger narratives later were overtaken by other scholars, some of them by his own research students. For himself he was to find the long essay a more suitable medium. These long essays, often well...