“... 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 ...”

“... the four recent British giants of broad-gauge history, Adam Sisman has now studied three: Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Briggs, leaving only Eric Hobsbawm to Richard Evans. Briggs’s widow, Susan, commissioned Sisman to write this Life, and in fact the man himself noted before his death in 2016 that if there had to be a biography, Sisman would be the ...”

“... the German people will be freed from foreign influence.’ The anomalies piled up, however, and Hugh Trevor-Roper and others immediately denounced the book as a forgery. Suggestively entitled Unmasked, it had obviously been in large part, if not completely, made up by Calic himself. I used to give the book to my students and ask them to decide whether ...”

“... us to reconstruct Early Modern family life. So Harrison reproaches his own profession, quoting Hugh Trevor-Roper to the effect that historians in general are great toadies of power. They could have written the history of the common people, but have chosen not to. ‘The historian shuts himself off from ever finding the common people as they saw ...”

“... puzzling figure. She was the middle daughter of a Munich schoolteacher and a former seamstress, Hugh Trevor-Roper called her ‘a historical disappointment’ on the grounds that she played ‘no role in the decisions that led to the worst crimes of the century’. Would a Lady Macbeth have been less ‘disappointing’? In contrast to Magda Goebbels ...”

“... contemporary political and cultural commentators – rather than media-friendly academics such as Hugh Trevor-Roper or A.J. Ayer. The very enterprise of comparative historical sociology, magnificent though it is in its tireless attempt to find pattern and explanation across societies and millennia, is bound to take an aerial view, and perhaps ...”

“... form the top layer and will go on doing so. 15 July. Finish reading Adam Sisman’s biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper, a wonderfully absorbing book. Seeing Trevor-Roper in Oxford in the 1950s I thought him extraordinarily young, so that when he was made regius professor in 1957 he still looked like an undergraduate. His ...”

“... group, would serve just as well.31 October. I’m reading a volume of letters from Richard Cobb to Hugh Trevor-Roper and others, edited by Tim Heald. Seeing it advertised and having devoured everything Cobb wrote I get hold of the book straightaway only to be slightly disappointed. It’s gossipy without being particularly funny with Cobb rather sucking ...”

“... states which can fund and constrain their historians to write about them. As late as the 1960s, Hugh Trevor-Roper made the incredible assertion that Africa had no history. And how many courses were offered in the 19th century in the University of Vienna on Slovenian history? How many are offered today? The very term ‘historical nation’ introduces a ...”

“... else could or should Hamlet and Satan have felt and done given their predicaments? History, Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote, ‘is not merely what happened; it is what happened in the context of what might have happened’. Any unfolding plot is an incitement and an invitation to consider other options and outcomes. So we might think of exclusion as ...”

“... an exclusive nationality. He invented for himself a synthesis of all religions, for which H.R. Trevor-Roper coined the name ‘the religion of mish-mash’. In 1946 Toynbee, according to Professor McNeill, ‘climaxed’ his official career by serving as a British delegate at yet another Peace Conference: unfortunately, ‘British weight in international ...”

“... lost husbands to the executioners, this self-dramatisation was rather distasteful. According to Hugh Trevor-Roper, writing in late 1958, ‘everyone who knows Pasternak agrees that he positively wanted trouble. Apparently he had a feeling of guilt and a desire for martyrdom. He was personally liked and protected by Stalin, and so survived when many of ...”

“... later appeared in a version only slightly toned down. Mark the sequel.In the Seventies, when Hugh Trevor-Roper put up his frightful Christ Church friend Zulfikar ali-Bhutto for an honorary degree, there was a row. Richard Gombrich and Steven Lukes led a petition to deny Oxford’s imprimatur to the man who had – among his many other crimes ...”

“... as up for it. Douglas Plummer, in his frank book Queer People (1963), insisted that ‘for every Hugh Walpole there are many thousands of ordinary labourers or lorry drivers or salesmen who are also homosexual.’ It’s a world where Walpole is still a touchstone, of class, artistic status and, 22 years after his death, of an exposed ...”