Hugh Trevor-Roper at Oxford

“We have invented language, refined it so that it can express even the subtlest thought, even the obscurest sensations; why then should we not use it, and dissolve difficulties by articulating them?” Hugh Trevor-Roper in a letter to James Howard-Johnston, his stepson, written at 8 St. Aldates, Oxford, June 19th 1960. “The trouble with controversies,” wrote Wallace Notestein, Professor of English History at Yale, to Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1968, “Is they will take your mind away from history. Historians need leisure and quiet almost as much as poets.” Of course, Trevor-Roper never did take the professor’s advice to heart. And although his critics stress the absence of the monumental volume that might have been expected of a high-flying Oxford don (and his relish for controversy would come back to bite him with his hurried ‘authentication’ of the forged Hitler diaries in 1983) time has been kind to Trevor-Roper’s reputation since his retirement and subsequent death in 2003. Born in Glanton, Northumberland a hundred years ago today, Hugh Trevor-Roper studied classics at Oxford before changing to history and gaining a first-class honours degree in 1936. During the Second World War he served as an officer in the Radio Security Service decrypting [...]