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“... Among Hugh Trevor-Roper’s historical interests it is the Early Modern period, from the late Renaissance to the Baroque, that has claimed his most distinctive literary form, the long essay. He is our finest practitioner of the genre since Macaulay – who wrote when the economics of publishing were friendlier to it ...”

“... be inclined to connect the two parts of his sentence in a relation of cause to effect. Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper offers himself as a flying doctor battling single-handed with what I think is called a pandemic. Having assured himself of the truth of a colleague’s diagnosis at Oxford of ‘creeping, or galloping illiteracy among university ...”

“... Fifty years, almost to the month, before the publication of John Adamson’s book, Hugh Trevor-Roper stated his intention to write what he knew would be ‘a very long book’, the most ambitious of his career, on the Puritan revolution of 17th-century England. The project went through many mutations over the next four years, but by 1961 it was virtually complete ...”

“... R.H. Tawney and Christopher Hill on the political left, Lawrence Stone in the Whig centre, and Hugh Trevor-Roper on the right. They were comfortable corroborating their own political predilection with sophisticated historical exposition and, it seems, happy for their opponents to do the same. All agreed on the significance of the events they were ...”

“... the President – but don’t tell me the CIA did it.’ Roughly this attitude is expressed by Hugh Trevor-Roper, in an endorsement of Conspiracy, when he speaks of ‘uncontrolled US intelligence agents’. But are any of them controlled? I approached The Man Who Kept the Secrets with eagerness after an American friend who writes rather thoughtful ...”

“... free market. Indeed, his legion of enemies ranged all the way across the political spectrum. When Hugh Trevor-Roper – raised to the peerage as Lord Dacre on Thatcher’s recommendation – became master of Peterhouse in 1980, he was dismayed to find that what he had imagined to be a congenially conservative environment provided instead an ecological ...”

“... English edition, also entitled The Grand Camouflage, appeared in 1968, with an introduction by Hugh Trevor-Roper. A third, called The Spanish Revolution, appeared in 1978-79 in English, Spanish and French. Finally, a newly revised text appeared. This work, over twice as long as the original text, was published by Alianza in Madrid in 1989. The book ...”

“... rebellion and revolt to the economic and political constraints imposed by feudal elites. In 1959 Hugh Trevor-Roper replaced Hobsbawm’s economic crisis with a political/fiscal one, a struggle between the centralising efforts of princely courts and government, on the one hand, and provincial and local powers on the other. In 1965 Hobsbawm and ...”

“... claim that his Origins of the Second World War was essentially Namierite is surely disingenuous: Hugh Trevor-Roper suggests, on the contrary, that Namier would have been appalled had he lived to read that book. Taylor’s attempt to drain the narrative of its moral content, to depict Hitler as a traditional statesman in international affairs pursuing ...”

“... and false dichotomies, and 25 books give a lot of hostages to fortune. Thirty years ago Hugh Trevor-Roper exposed his methods of argumentation and documentation, complaining that his ‘scholarship is transformed into advocacy’ and that he approached his evidence with his ‘conclusions already determined’. Twenty years ago Hill’s ...”

“... from the centre. In the latter case, the revenge of the centre is sweet: send in the debunkers; Hugh Trevor-Roper, who has a selective nose for fakes, got the kilt job in The Invention of Tradition (1983). He made much of the difference between the authentic ‘plaid’, starting from the shoulders, and the modern ‘kilt’, starting from the ...”

“... Enlightenment’, a Trojan horse concept smuggled into the historical canon by Hugh Trevor-Roper. Yet, in spite of its metropolitan connections and aspirations, which so irritate modern nationalists and complicate the very notion of a Scottish Enlightenment, the 18th-century Scots intelligentsia – unlike the English – did unite ...”

“... blend with those of the past. The result is piquant. It is odd to think of Geoffrey Elton, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Lewis Namier as one thinks of Edward Freeman, Samuel Gardner and Edward Gibbon, humanised and distanced at the same time. Vanity and virtue, foolishness and brilliance rub shoulders. One imagines one has heard it all before, but the ...”

“... for a Chair at Oxford in favour of a nonentity who has never written anything, not even academic. Hugh Trevor-Roper was passed over too, so I am in good company; and he was passed over for the same reason – he writes for the New Statesman. You say that serious papers will want me less. But no serious paper wants me at all as a political writer. I ...”

“... 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 ...”