“... the footnotes added to Gibbon’s by Oliphant Smeaton in 1910 illuminated by an Introduction by Hugh Trevor-Roper (it would be hard to say what musical analogy Collingwood might have found for that).* All these editions have presented Gibbon as part of the heritage of English letters, his unbelief and irony modulated into an urbanity acceptable to ...”

“... Like the brightest if not necessarily the best of the immediately preceding generation, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Bossy has not infrequently found out that he has been wrong. But who cares? The mistakes have been exposed, sometimes by himself, the argument has moved on, and he has kept us awake and alert, unlike most of his peers. In recent years ...”

“... his failure to get a first) ‘hurt’ Tawney very much: one was the savaging given him by Hugh Trevor-Roper in the scholarly debate over ‘the rise of the gentry’; the other was Margaret Cole’s publication of an ephemeral work on the Webbs when Tawney had been contracted to write Sidney’s biography. In both cases, Goldman is at pains to ...”

“... development of Parliament (Robert Blake), ‘War and Peace with Wales, Scotland and Ireland’ (Hugh Trevor-Roper), art and popular taste (Quentin Bell), the evolution of the English landscape (Richard Muir) – are excellent and briskly-written popularising surveys. But the whole enterprise, I do think, is compromised by those gestures towards ‘the ...”

“... his time. But if that work made him a household name, it did nothing for his academic reputation: Hugh Trevor-Roper, not Taylor, was appointed regius professor in 1957. Quick to feel slighted, Taylor became ever more populist, and for a time limited his commitments at Oxford in order to direct the Beaverbrook Library. During the 1970s and the early 1980s ...”

“... the second did not it might well have done, and its issues were no less profound or dangerous. As Hugh Trevor-Roper insists in one of the essays in his recent volume From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution,* a fundamental continuity of anxiety and of purpose runs through the successive generations of the 17th-century ruling class. Yet amidst the ...”

“... thesis, if something so underdeveloped can be called that, was widely shared in Whitehall. When Hugh Trevor-Roper joined MI6 in 1941, he doubted that ‘there was one man [there] at that time, who had read Mein Kampf’. Indeed, Hitler’s rise to power made virtually no impression at all on the ‘defenders of the realm’, except as an opportunity to ...”

“... as the products of a barbarous tribe in a ‘picturesque but irrelevant’ corner of the globe, as Hugh Trevor-Roper referred to Africa. Nonetheless, their market value was high and continues to appreciate: in 2016, a bronze head in a private collection sold for £10 million, more than double its price nine years earlier. The British Museum acquired the ...”

“... at least White and Tyacke can find common ground in their emphasis on the 1620s: a decade which Hugh Trevor-Roper has compared, in his vivid re-creation of its effect upon the generation which lived through it, to the 1930s. In politics, Arminianism was essentially a 1620s issue. It remained politically inflammatory in the 1630s, but by then Laud’s ...”

“... of my life.’ Cornwell agreed to co-operate with Sisman after reading his last book, a Life of Hugh Trevor-Roper. In an intriguingly cagey introduction, Sisman describes the resulting deal. Cornwell would give him long interviews, access to his archives, and a list of introductions. ‘I was to have a free hand to write what I wanted, provided that I ...”

“... scholar. There were flirtations with academia, including an episode acting as stalking horse for Hugh Trevor-Roper in his pursuit of the regius professorship. Overall his relationship to the academy was yet another of those ambivalent connections that characterised him. Much as he affected to dislike the idea of a university post he was more than once ...”

“... the Fifties he encountered keen criticism from academic historians, spearheaded by Pieter Geyl and Hugh Trevor-Roper, which marginalised his major project in the eyes of his own profession. As his new biographer, William McNeill, candidly declares, ‘a principal purpose of this book is to try to establish a better balance between the popular adulation on ...”

“... civil wars is hardly new. The narratives of Gardiner and of C.V. Wedgwood, and the essays of Hugh Trevor-Roper on the civil wars, were written by historians quite as alive as Russell to ‘the problem of multiple kingdoms’, even if they felt no need for a ponderous term to describe it. Their main concern, it is true, was the history of ...”

“... and that was a sort of martyrdom too. It would be unkind, in this context, to recall that when Hugh Trevor-Roper reviewed Waugh’s life of Campion, the headline was ‘Twice Martyred’, but, if there is a library in Purgatory, Stannard’s book, with its frequent grammatical solecisms, its plodding attempts at psychiatry and its crude view of the ...”

“... There is no tidy box of historical explanation into which we can put him. The brisk judgment of Hugh Trevor-Roper was that Cromwell ‘was a freak in English history’. It has always been easier to fall back on broad-brush assertions or to dismiss him with an adjective: ‘sinister’ and ‘Machiavellian’ used to be two of the most common. As ...”