The Trope: Hugh Trevor-Roper

A trope is a figure of speech, and it was a nickname some knew him by, since he was notoriously fond of them. “This elaborate trope,” Hugh Trevor- Roper once wrote to his beloved mentor Bernard Berenson in 1952, playfully excusing a metaphor that had gotten out of hand. The word can also mean something added to a liturgy as a musical embellishment, which is apt too, since he was a stylist among English historians of his day. Rivals sometimes called him a journalist, meaning he wrote well. A big man with a big voice, he could be witty and waspish in talk and print, and he was always greedy for scandal: “What’s the dirt on him?” There was something melodious about him too. As a fifteen-year-old schoolboy he came upon Milton’s Nativity Ode and found that English, if you knew how to handle it, can sound orchestral. Macaulay had noticed this a century before, and claimed to know Paradise Lost by heart. Hugh commended Macaulay’s influence, though he found his optimism a trifle vulgar at times; and Hugh revived the tempo of Macaulay’s style and much of his substance.

Both were masters of brisk contention and the vivid, compelling character-sketch, since the past is a gallery of characters; both were Whigs, venerating ancient forms and constitutions which, as they knew, can prove more radical than any revolution. Nations change enduringly—not by shattering ancient forms but by working through them and within them, as the English monarchy changed over the centuries from Stuart tyranny to a ceremonial and advisory role. Reform, as Macaulay instructed the Commons in 1831, that you may preserve.

Hugh’s life (1914–2003) spanned the years when revolutions were rashly tried over and over again and seen to fail. There were two Russian revolutions when he was three, and in January 1933, in his freshman year at Oxford, Hitler seized power in Germany. Hugh, who is said to have learned German in order to read classical historians like Wilamowitz, promptly used it to read Mein Kampf, and before he was thirty he was working for British Special Intelligence, monitoring German wartime radio. Then in May 1945, Hitler, another failed revolutionary, killed himself. Student days were something he preferred not to speak of, but some recall Hugh as an undergraduate leader of those who opposed war and favored appeasement. It was probably Churchill, that old radical elected to the Commons in Victorian times, that drew him into a love of the heroic, where history became a matter of great lives and a public clash of wills. As an historian he always disdained the severely specialized and the dryly statistical. The past was a drama, even a melodrama, with conspiracies and scandals. It could be outrageous or sublime: the merely archival seldom interested him. “Dull,” he would remark briefly if you mentioned someone who did archival history. As a young man at Asquith’s dinner party in Downing Street, Churchill had once called himself a glowworm—“We are all worms, but I think that I am a glow-worm”—and Hugh would have agreed. He had to shine.

It is odd he never looked or sounded old hat, and his face in his middle years, which was large, smooth and brown, had the gift of making him look young. I first encountered him in postwar Oxford in the days of austerity, a young don widely associated with high jinks, smashing pianos and breaking glass with titled friends (though his own northern origins were fairly ordinary), and he is said to have woken a whole college quadrangle in the small hours by charging in with a bunch of drunken cronies from the Bullingdon Club in white ties. Hugh was blowing a hunting horn. Very Brideshead. Evelyn Waugh had recently written a novel to mourn the passing of that enchanted world, but nobody had told Hugh. He adored the witty, the well-connected, and the beautiful, rejoiced in blood sports, and appeared one term on a lecture platform encased top-down in a hard shell of plaster after a hunting fall...