Background
Hugh Trevor-Roper was born on January 15, 1914, in Glanton, United Kingdom. He was the elder son of Bertie William Edward Trevor-Roper, a physician, and Kathleen Elizabeth Davidson.
1950
Oxford OX1 2JD, United Kingdom
British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton at Oxford University, 25th November 1950. A Fellow of Christ Church College, he is the author of "The Last Days of Hitler."
1968
Houghton St, Holborn, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom
Students fill the Old Theatre at the London School of Economics to hear the Oration Day lecture by Oxford historian Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper.
Young Hugh Trevor-Roper
Historian Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper leads the campaign to elect Harold MacMillan as the new Chancellor.
British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton
Lord Dacre of Glanton - the historian Hugh Trevor Roper - leaving Heathrow for Hamburg, where he is to give a press conference about the Hitler diaries published in Stern Magazine.
(The classic account of Hitler's fall from power, first pu...)
The classic account of Hitler's fall from power, first published in 1947, reissued with a striking new cover In September 1945 the fate of Adolf Hitler was a complete mystery. He had simply disappeared and had been missing for four months. Hugh Trevor-Roper, an intelligence officer, was given the task of solving the mystery. His brilliant piece of detective work not only proved finally that Hitler had killed himself in Berlin but also produced one of the most fascinating history books ever written. This is the extraordinary story of those last days of the Thousand-Year Reich in the Berlin Bunker. Besieged in the shattered capital, but still dominating the remains of his court, Hitler reiterated the original alternative of Nazism: either total victory or annihilation. This book is the record of that carefully prepared, ceremonious finale to a terrible chapter of history.
https://www.amazon.com/Last-Days-Hitler-Hugh-Trevor-Roper/dp/1447218612/ref=sr_1_5?dchild=1&keywords=Hugh+Trevor-Roper&qid=1601975758&rnid=2941120011&s=books&sr=1-5
1947
(Hitler's Table Talk records the private, off the record, ...)
Hitler's Table Talk records the private, off the record, informal conversations of a man who, more than anyone else, came close to destroying the western world. On Martin Bormann's instructions, the secret conversations at Hitler's headquarters from July 1941 to November 1944 were all recorded. This is the real companion volume to Hitler's Mein Kampf, whereby what had been a project suddenly was reality, almost to the disbelief of its author. Here is a startling account of Hitler freely talking about his enemies, his friends, his ambitions, his failures, his secret dreams voicing his thoughts to his intimate associates as the sunset at the end of each day of the war. We see here a conversational Hitler letting down his guard to his trusted henchmen. Miraculously, Martin Bormann persuaded Hitler to let these talks be taken down by a team of specially picked shorthand writers. Now they have come to us, indisputably authentic, a raw, fascinating, unretouched look at the inner recesses of the mind of Adolf Hitler. Der Fuhrer's mind was crude and narrow; he had little education and, as we see here, no humanity; but we can also see that he was (as he himself knew) a political genius, a terrible simplifier, a man who, with no equipment except his own will power, personality and ideas, attempted to bring mankind into a terrible darkness.
https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Table-Talk-1941-1944-Trevor-Roper/dp/B0036J8856/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Hitler%E2%80%99s+Table+Talk%2C+1941%E2%80%931944&qid=1601977312&sr=8-2
1953
(The story of one of the most outrageous confidence tricks...)
The story of one of the most outrageous confidence tricksters of the twentieth century, Sir Edmund Blackhouse.
https://www.amazon.com/Hermit-Peking-Hidden-Edmund-Backhouse/dp/190601101X/ref=sr_1_25?dchild=1&keywords=Hugh+Trevor-Roper&qid=1601975760&rnid=2941120011&s=books&sr=1-25
1976
https://www.amazon.com/Princes-Artists-Patronage-Trevor-Roper-1991-05-07/dp/B01K0UZIYM/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1601977179&sr=8-1
1976
(Hugh Trevor-Roper's historical essays, published over man...)
Hugh Trevor-Roper's historical essays, published over many years in many different forms, are now difficult to find. This volume gathers together pieces on British and European history from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries, ending with the Thirty Years War, which Trevor-Roper views as the great historical and intellectual watershed that marked the end of the Renaissance. Covering a wide range of topics, these writings reflect the many facets of Trevor-Roper's interest in intellectual and cultural history. Included are discussions of Renaissance Venice; the arts as patronized by that "universal man," Emperor Maximilian I; the court of Henry VIII and the ideas of Sir Thomas More; the Lisle Letters and the formidable Cromwellian revolution; the historiography and the historical philosophy of the Elizabethans John Stow and William Camden; religion and the "judicious Hooker," the great doctor of the Anglican Church; medicine and medical philosophy, shaken out of its orthodoxy by Paracelsus and his disciples; literature and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy; and the ideology of the Renaissance courts. Trevor-Roper sets his intellectual and cultural history in the context of society and politics: in the realization of ideas, the patronage of the arts, the interpretation of history, the social challenge of science, the social application of religion. This volume of essays confirms his reputation as a spectacular writer of history and master essayist. Hugh Trevor-Roper's historical essays, published over many years in many different forms, are now difficult to find. This volume gathers together pieces on British and European history from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries, ending with the Thirty Years War, which Trevor-Roper views as the great historical and intellectual watershed that marked the end of the Renaissance.
https://www.amazon.com/Renaissance-Essays-Hugh-Trevor-Roper/dp/0226812251/ref=sr_1_15?dchild=1&keywords=Hugh+Trevor-Roper&qid=1601975758&rnid=2941120011&s=books&sr=1-15
1986
(Renaissance Essays, published in 1985, confirmed Hugh Tre...)
Renaissance Essays, published in 1985, confirmed Hugh Trevor-Roper's reputation as one of the most distinguished writers of history and as an unequaled master of the historical essay. Received with critical acclaim in both England and the United States, the volume gathered wide-ranging essays on both British and European history from the fifteenth century to the early seventeenth centuries. This sequel, Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans, is composed of five previously unpublished essays on the intellectual and religious movements which lay behind the Puritan revolution in England and Ireland.
https://www.amazon.com/Catholics-Anglicans-Puritans-Seventeenth-Century-Essays/dp/0226812286/ref=sr_1_14?dchild=1&keywords=Hugh+Trevor-Roper&qid=1601975758&rnid=2941120011&s=books&sr=1-14
1987
(The most powerful man in England during the so-called "El...)
The most powerful man in England during the so-called "Eleven Years Tyranny" from 1629-1640, archbishop of Canterbury William Laud was thrown from power in 1640 and executed on Tower Hill during the Civil War. He remains a controversial figure in English history, either denounced as a tyrant and bigot or extolled as a statesman and martyr. An esteemed scholar uncovers the social ideal that lay behind Laud's political and religious conservatism - an ideal fatally obscured by the archbishop's human limitations.
https://www.amazon.com/Archbishop-Laud-Phoenix-Press-Trevor-Roper/dp/1842122029/ref=sr_1_19?dchild=1&keywords=Hugh+Trevor-Roper&qid=1601975760&rnid=2941120011&s=books&sr=1-19
2001
(In 1947, 33-year-old historian Hugh Trevor-Roper and 82-y...)
In 1947, 33-year-old historian Hugh Trevor-Roper and 82-year-old world-famous art critic Bernard Berenson met for the first time. Trevor-Roper promised to write to Berenson, and his letters continued until his friend, frail but still intensely curious about the world, died in 1959. Elegantly constructed, beautifully and precisely written, Trevor-Roper's correspondences are shot through with high-octane malice, sharp judgments, blistering comments, and many wonderfully funny episodes. From meeting Communist dignitaries behind the Iron Curtain to speeding in his glamorous gray Bentley to visit duchesses in the Scottish borders, this collection sets a tone of amusement at the "human comedy," the vanity, snobbery, intrigue, and human weakness that Trevor-Roper saw all around him. In 1947, 33-year-old historian Hugh Trevor-Roper and 82-year-old world-famous art critic Bernard Berenson met for the first time. Trevor-Roper promised to write to Berenson, and his letters continued until his friend, frail but still intensely curious about the world, died in 1959.
https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Oxford-Trevor-Roper-Bernard-Berenson/dp/0297850849/ref=sr_1_23?dchild=1&keywords=Hugh+Trevor-Roper&qid=1601975760&rnid=2941120011&s=books&sr=1-23
2006
(This book argues that while Anglo-Saxon culture has given...)
This book argues that while Anglo-Saxon culture has given rise to virtually no myths at all, the myth has played a central role in the historical development of Scottish identity. Hugh Trevor-Roper explores three myths across 400 years of Scottish history: the political myth of the "ancient constitution" of Scotland; the literary myth, including Walter Scott as well as Ossian and ancient poetry; and the sartorial myth of tartan and the kilt, invented - ironically, by Englishmen - in quite modern times. Trevor-Roper reveals myth as an often deliberate cultural construction used to enshrine a people’s identity. While his treatment of Scottish myth is highly critical, indeed debunking, he shows how the ritualization and domestication of Scotland’s myths as local color diverted the Scottish intelligentsia from the path that led German intellectuals to a dangerous myth of racial supremacy. This compelling manuscript was left unpublished on Trevor-Roper’s death in 2003 and is now made available for the first time. Written with characteristic elegance, lucidity, and wit, and containing defiant and challenging opinions, it will absorb and provoke Scottish readers while intriguing many others.
https://www.amazon.com/Invention-Scotland-Hugh-Trevor-Roper-ebook/dp/B0089W2I1U/ref=sr_1_11?dchild=1&keywords=Hugh+Trevor-Roper&qid=1601975758&rnid=2941120011&s=books&sr=1-11
2008
(As a British Intelligence Officer during World War II, Hu...)
As a British Intelligence Officer during World War II, Hugh Trevor-Roper was expressly forbidden from keeping a diary due to the sensitive and confidential nature of his work. He had many high-placed enemies in the Secret Intelligence Service who would have been pleased to use his journals to have him court-martialled or dismissed. However, he confided a record of his thoughts, contacts, and plans to a series of slender notebooks inscribed OHMS ('On His Majesty's Service'). The Wartime Journals reveal the voice and experiences of a war-time 'backroom boy' who spent most of the war engaged in highly-confidential intelligence work in England - including breaking the cipher code of the German secret service, the Abwehr.
https://www.amazon.com/Wartime-Journals-Hugh-Trevor-Roper-ebook/dp/B07PBDF62K/ref=sr_1_12?dchild=1&keywords=Hugh+Trevor-Roper&qid=1601975758&rnid=2941120011&s=books&sr=1-12
2011
(During World War II, Britain enjoyed spectacular success ...)
During World War II, Britain enjoyed spectacular success in the secret war between hostile intelligence services, enabling a substantial and successful expansion of British counter-espionage which continued to grow in the Cold War era. Hugh Trevor-Roper's experiences working in the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) during the war left a profound impression on him and he later observed the world of intelligence with particular discernment.
https://www.amazon.com/Secret-World-Curtain-British-Intelligence-ebook/dp/B07PBQSX2V/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Hugh+Trevor-Roper&qid=1601975758&rnid=2941120011&s=books&sr=1-2
2014
Hugh Trevor-Roper was born on January 15, 1914, in Glanton, United Kingdom. He was the elder son of Bertie William Edward Trevor-Roper, a physician, and Kathleen Elizabeth Davidson.
Trevor-Roper attended Belhaven Hill School, Charterhouse. Educated at Christ Church, Oxford, Hugh originally planned to study the classics but switched to modern history as an undergraduate. He graduated from college in 1936, and in 1939, as a research fellow at Merton College, he qualified for the Master of Arts degree.
During the Second World War Hugh Trevor-Roper served in the Radio Security Service. Later he worked for the Secret Intelligence Service where he was involved in the project to penetrate the German Secret Service. Trevor-Roper later claimed that his boss, Kim Philby, undermined attempts by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris to negotiate with the British government.
From 1946 to 1957 Trevor-Roper taught history at Christ Church and quickly established a reputation as a controversialist - one who believes that ideas can prompt social change - with right of center views who had little sympathy for leftist scholars who took a more determinist view of history.
Although he published a biography of Archbishop Laud, Charles I's Puritan-baiting archbishop of Canterbury, in 1940, Trevor-Roper produced no single great work of scholarship on the 16th or 17th centuries, his preferred field of study. Most of his published work took the form of essays.
In 1945 he was sent to Germany to find out if the claims being made by Joseph Stalin that Adolf Hitler was still alive. This involved him interviewing all the survivors of Hitler's staff. This material became the main source for his book, "The Last Days of Hitler" (1947). He also produced "Hitler's Table Talk" (1953).
''The Last Days of Hitler'' was based on the official investigation into Hitler's fate conducted by Trevor-Roper as a wartime officer in Britain's Secret Intelligence Service. Relying mainly on interviews with captured Nazi leaders and others close to Hitler, Trevor-Roper established that Hitler's new wife, Eva Braun, took poison and that he shot himself at about 3:30 p.m. on May 1, 1945, as Soviet forces advanced on the Reich Chancellery's bunker, and that their bodies were burned in the yard. The book also painted an extraordinary picture of a deluded, isolated Nazi leadership holed up in the bunker and believing right up to the end that it would turn defeat into victory.
The investigation sought to establish once and for all that Hitler was dead because his remains had not been found.
The Soviet Union had denied finding any trace of the bodies when it captured the bunker. Stalin told Truman at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945 he thought Hitler was alive and living in Spain or Argentina.
Although Trevor-Roper was certain that Hitler had committed suicide, he concluded that Hitler's remains were unlikely to be found. ''Like Alaric, buried secretly under the riverbed of Busento, the modern destroyer of mankind is now immune from discovery,'' he wrote.
In the 1940s and 1950s, he engaged in a longstanding debate in "The Economic History Review" about whether the economic fortunes of the English land-owning classes rose or fell in the century between 1540 and 1640 and what effect this had on the English civil war and the Cromwellian revolution.
He argued that declining, impoverished gentry, battered by inflation, started the Puritan revolution as a revolt against the monarchy and its hangers-on whose power and privileges allowed them to profit from the economic crisis gripping the rest of the country.
The debate with two other prominent British historians was repeated on a wider canvas in the 1950s and 1960s in a magazine called Past and Present.
His appointment as to the prestigious post of the regius professor was also mired in controversy. It was made in 1957 by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, a Conservative. He won out over A. J. P. Taylor, another Oxford historian who badly wanted it. Taylor spent the rest of his life feuding with Professor Trevor-Roper.
Three years later Professor Trevor-Roper repaid his debt by effectively managing Macmillan's successful campaign to become chancellor of Oxford.
In 1968 he published ''The Philby Affair,'' a study of the notorious British traitor whom he had befriended when they were in the Intelligence Service together. He had been surprised to find Philby working there since he knew he had been a Communist in his youth. He was director of Times Newspapers from 1974 to 1988. Trevor-Roper has created a life peer in 1979, entering the House of Lords as Lord (or Baron) Dacre of Glanton.
In 1980, he moved to Cambridge University to become master of Peterhouse, but quarreled with the college fellows, accusing them of being more interested in comfort than in scholarship.
In the 1990's it was learned that the Russians had taken Hitler's jaw and a fragment of his skull back to Moscow but buried the remains of the bodies at Magdeburg, in East Germany, where they were destroyed on Leonid I. Brezhnev's orders in 1970.
Trevor-Roper's scholarly reputation suffered a shattering reverse in April 1983 when he held the regius chair of modern history at Oxford and had been created Lord Dacre of Glanton. He authenticated about 60 volumes said to be Hitler's diaries. The diaries were then sold by the German magazine Stern to The Times newspaper group in London. A few days later, he reversed himself, saying he had ''misunderstood the nature of their procurement'' and now doubted their authenticity. A month later, the German government said chemical testing proved they were fakes. In 1985, Konrad Kujau, a Stuttgart dealer in Nazi memorabilia from whom Stern obtained the documents, was convicted of fraud in the case.
Trevor-Roper's other works include ''The Rise of Christian Europe''(1965), ''The European Witch Craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries''(1970), and ''From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution'' (1992).
(During World War II, Britain enjoyed spectacular success ...)
2014(The most powerful man in England during the so-called "El...)
2001(Renaissance Essays, published in 1985, confirmed Hugh Tre...)
1987(This book argues that while Anglo-Saxon culture has given...)
2008(The classic account of Hitler's fall from power, first pu...)
1947(As a British Intelligence Officer during World War II, Hu...)
2011(Hitler's Table Talk records the private, off the record, ...)
1953(In 1947, 33-year-old historian Hugh Trevor-Roper and 82-y...)
2006(Hugh Trevor-Roper's historical essays, published over man...)
1986(The story of one of the most outrageous confidence tricks...)
1976Trevor-Roper was criticized for what was perceived as antipathy to the Christian church.
A supporter of the Conservative Party, in 1959 Trevor-Roper led the campaign to get Harold Macmillan elected as Chancellor of Oxford University.
Trevor-Roper's approach to history was essentially belletrist - based not so much on original research as on wide reading and an ability to bring to bear insights derived from other disciplines on his subjects. He sought to appeal to a wide cultivated audience.
Trevor-Roper was noted for his panoramic grasp of history, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the spy scandals of his own day', and for his eagerness to synthesize analyses based on a wide range of sources, from anthropology and economics to philosophy and psychology.
Trevor-Roper commanded respect for his erudition and for the wide range of his topical expertise, but he was also contentious, controversial, and, according to some, his own worst enemy.
In 1954, Trevor-Roper married Lady Alexandra Howard-Johnson. She died in 1997. They had no children.