The Wartime Journals by Hugh Trevor-Roper and ed. by Richard Davenport-Hines (review)

In 1941–42, Hugh Trevor-Roper, in defiance of the prohibition imposed by the British intelligence services which recruited him at the beginning of World War II, began keeping a journal, which he continued intermittently until 1947. Following his death in 2003, the notebooks containing the journal were found hidden in his house by his literary executor and Richard Davenport-Hines, and the latter, who has skillfully edited them, has now published them under the title of The Wartime Journals. The resulting volume makes fascinating reading. Anyone interested in the development of one of the great historians of the twentieth century will enjoy seeing how Trevor-Roper, who was twenty-seven at the time when he began to keep his journal, sharpened his writing skills, partly in emulation of the published notebooks of Samuel Butler, the author of Erewhon, but also heavily influenced by the anglicized American man of letters Logan Pearsall Smith, who became a friend. The influence was not entirely beneficial, and some of the entries are excessively self-conscious and have about them an aura of preciosity. But the contents of the volume are likely to come as a revelation to those who know Trevor-Roper primarily as the historian of The Last Days of Hitler. There are, as might be expected, sharp comments on the complacency and stupidity of colleagues in the Secret Service. But the Journals also reveal a man who was never happier than riding to hounds through the English countryside and who displays a powerful visual sense, a deep feeling for the beauties of the natural world, and a remarkable capacity to evoke a place and a scene with a few vivid strokes of the pen. These qualities were among those that would make him the consummate historian he later became, and these Journals, now happily rescued from oblivion, will be a source of great enjoyment to a wide range of readers.