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Walsingham’s Plumber

Patrick Collinson: John Bossy, 5 July 2001

Under the Molehill: An Elizabethan Spy Story 
by John Bossy.
Yale, 189 pp., £18.95, May 2001, 0 300 08400 5
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... 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 ...

Flirting

P.N. Furbank, 18 November 1982

The English World: History, Character and People 
edited by Robert Blake.
Thames and Hudson, 268 pp., £14.95, September 1982, 0 500 25083 9
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The English Gentleman: The Rise and Fall of an Ideal 
by Philip Mason.
Deutsch, 240 pp., £9.95, September 1982, 9780233974897
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... 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 ...

Only Men in Mind

Susan Pedersen: R.H. Tawney, 21 August 2014

The Life of R.H. Tawney 
by Lawrence Goldman.
Bloomsbury, 411 pp., £65, September 2013, 978 1 78093 704 5
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... 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 ...

Heat-Seeking

Susan Pedersen: A.J.P. Taylor, 10 May 2007

A.J.P. Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe 
by Chris Wrigley.
Tauris, 439 pp., £25, August 2006, 1 86064 286 1
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... 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 ...

Despairing Radicals

Blair Worden, 25 June 1992

Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet 
by Katherine Duncan-Jones.
Hamish Hamilton, 350 pp., £20, September 1991, 0 241 12650 9
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Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis 
by Jonathan Scott.
Cambridge, 406 pp., £40, October 1991, 0 521 35291 6
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Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage 
by Alan Craig Houston.
Princeton, 335 pp., £22.50, November 1991, 0 691 07860 2
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Milton’s ‘History of Britain’: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution 
by Nicholas von Maltzahn.
Oxford, 244 pp., £32.50, November 1991, 0 19 812897 5
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... 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 ...

Stuck on the Flypaper

Frances Stonor Saunders: The Hobsbawm File, 9 April 2015

... 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 ...

Puritan Neuroses

Blair Worden, 19 April 1984

The Puritan Gentry: The Great Puritan Families of Early Stuart England 
by J.T. Cliffe.
Routledge, 313 pp., £18.95, March 1984, 0 7102 0007 2
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The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County 
by William Hunt.
Harvard, 365 pp., £30.60, April 1983, 0 674 73903 5
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Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism 
by Patrick Collinson.
Hambledon, 604 pp., £24, July 1982, 9780907628156
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Laud’s Laboratory: The Diocese of Bath and Wells in the Early 17th Century 
by Margaret Steig.
Associated University Presses, 416 pp., £30, September 1983, 0 8387 5019 2
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The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression 
by Patricia Caldwell.
Cambridge, 210 pp., £17.50, December 1983, 0 521 25460 4
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Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford 
by C.M. Dent.
Oxford, 262 pp., £17.50, June 1983, 0 19 826723 1
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... 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 ...

Strewn with Loot

Adewale Maja-Pearce, 12 August 2021

The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution 
by Dan Hicks.
Pluto, 368 pp., £20, November 2020, 978 0 7453 4176 7
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Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes 
by Barnaby Phillips.
Oneworld, 388 pp., £20, April, 978 1 78607 935 0
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... 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 ...

Conrad Russell’s Civil War

Blair Worden, 29 August 1991

The Causes of the English Civil War 
by Conrad Russell.
Oxford, 236 pp., £35, November 1990, 0 19 822142 8
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The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637-1642 
by Conrad Russell.
Oxford, 580 pp., £40, April 1991, 9780198227540
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... 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 ...

When the pistol goes off

Peter Clarke, 17 August 1989

Arnold Toynbee: A Life 
by William McNeill.
Oxford, 346 pp., £16.95, July 1989, 0 19 505863 1
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... 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 ...

Our Dear Channel Islands

Linda Holt, 25 May 1995

The Model Occupation: The Channel Islands under German Rule 1940-1945 
by Madeleine Bunting.
HarperCollins, 354 pp., £20, January 1995, 0 00 255242 6
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The Channel Islands: Occupation and Liberation 1940-1945 
by Asa Briggs.
Batsford, 96 pp., £7.99, April 1995, 0 7134 7822 5
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... ignorance and prejudices. No one has been disconcerted by the book’s solecisms, large or small; Hugh Trevor-Roper has called it ‘a masterly work of profound research and reflection’, Norman Stone praised Bunting as ‘a superb chronicler’, Alan Clark admires her ‘careful research’. No doubt her readers have been dazzled, as I was, by her ...

Possessed

A.N. Wilson, 14 May 1992

Evelyn Waugh: No Abiding City 1939-1966 
by Martin Stannard.
Dent, 523 pp., £25, April 1992, 0 460 86062 3
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... 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 ...

Born to Lying

Theo Tait: Le Carré, 3 December 2015

John le Carré: The Biography 
by Adam Sisman.
Bloomsbury, 652 pp., £25, October 2015, 978 1 4088 2792 5
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... 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 ...

Herberts & Herbertinas

Rosemary Hill: Steven Runciman, 20 October 2016

Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman 
by Minoo Dinshaw.
Penguin, 767 pp., £30, September 2016, 978 0 241 00493 7
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... 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 ...

A Man It Would Be Unwise to Cross

Stephen Alford: Thomas Cromwell, 8 November 2018

Thomas Cromwell: A Life 
by Diarmaid MacCulloch.
Allen Lane, 752 pp., £30, September 2018, 978 1 84614 429 5
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... 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 ...

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