49 Facts About Hugh Trevor-Roper

1.

Hugh Trevor-Roper was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford.

2.

Hugh Trevor-Roper showed that Hitler's dictatorship was not an efficient unified machine but a hodge-podge of overlapping rivalries.

3.

Hugh Trevor-Roper's reputation was "severely damaged" in 1983 when he authenticated the Hitler Diaries shortly before they were shown to be forgeries.

4.

Hugh Trevor-Roper was born at Glanton, Northumberland, England, the son of Kathleen Elizabeth Davidson and Bertie William Edward Hugh Trevor-Roper, a doctor, descended from Henry Roper, 8th Baron Teynham, who married, Anne, 16th Baroness Dacre.

5.

Hugh Trevor-Roper was educated at Belhaven Hill School, Charterhouse, and Christ Church, Oxford, where he read first Classics and then Modern History.

6.

Hugh Trevor-Roper took a first in Classical Moderations in 1934 and won the Craven, the Ireland, and the Hertford scholarships in Classics.

7.

Hugh Trevor-Roper's first book was a 1940 biography of Archbishop William Laud, in which he challenged many of the prevailing perceptions surrounding Laud.

8.

Hugh Trevor-Roper was a member of the University of Oxford's Officer Training Corps, reaching the rank of officer cadet corporal.

9.

Hugh Trevor-Roper formed a low opinion of most pre-war professional intelligence agents, but a higher one of some of the post-1939 recruits.

10.

Hugh Trevor-Roper transformed the evidence into a literary work, with sardonic humour and drama, and was much influenced by the prose styles of two of his favourite historians, Edward Gibbon and Lord Macaulay.

11.

Rosenbaum reports that Hugh Trevor-Roper told him this was the most extreme response he had ever received for one of his books.

12.

In June 1950, Trevor-Roper attended a conference in Berlin of anti-Communist intellectuals along with Sidney Hook, Melvin J Lasky, Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron and Franz Borkenau that resulted in the founding of the CIA front group Congress for Cultural Freedom and its magazine Encounter.

13.

Hugh Trevor-Roper was famous for his lucid and acerbic writing style.

14.

Hugh Trevor-Roper argued that history should be understood as an art, not a science and that the attribute of a successful historian was imagination.

15.

Hugh Trevor-Roper viewed history as full of contingency, with the past neither a story of continuous advance nor of continuous decline but the consequence of choices made by individuals at the time.

16.

Hugh Trevor-Roper's preferred medium of expression was the essay rather than the book.

17.

In Hugh Trevor-Roper's opinion, the dispute between the Puritans and the Arminians was a major, although not the sole, cause of the English Civil War.

18.

Hugh Trevor-Roper argued that while office-holders and lawyers were prospering, the lesser gentry were in decline.

19.

In 1948, a paper put forward by Stone in support of Tawney's thesis was vigorously attacked by Hugh Trevor-Roper, who showed that Stone had exaggerated the debt problems of the Tudor nobility.

20.

Hugh Trevor-Roper rejected Tawney's theories about the rising gentry and declining nobility, arguing that he was guilty of selective use of evidence and that he misunderstood the statistics.

21.

Hugh Trevor-Roper argued that the globalist case sought to turn a scattering of Hitler's remarks made over decades into a plan.

22.

Cesarani wrote that Dawidowicz was wrong to accuse Hugh Trevor-Roper of antisemitism but argued that there was an element of truth to her critique in that the Shoah was a blind-spot for Hugh Trevor-Roper.

23.

Hugh Trevor-Roper was a very firm "intentionist" who treated Hitler as a serious, if slightly deranged thinker who, from 1924 until his death in 1945, was obsessed with "the conquest of Russia, the extermination of the Slavs, and the colonization of the English".

24.

Hugh Trevor-Roper maintained that Hitler, on the basis of a wide range of antisemitic literature, from the writings of Houston Stewart Chamberlain to The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, had constructed a racist ideology that called for making Germany the world's greatest power and the extermination of perceived enemies like the Jews and Slavs.

25.

Cesarani stated that Hugh Trevor-Roper was sincere in his hatred and contempt for the Nazis and everything they stood for but he had considerable difficulty when it came to writing about the complicity and involvement of traditional German elites in National Socialism, because the traditional elites in Germany were so similar in many ways to the British Establishment, which Hugh Trevor-Roper identified with so strongly.

26.

Cesarani noted that while Hugh Trevor-Roper supported the Conservatives and ended his days as a Tory life-peer, he was broadly speaking a liberal and believed that Britain was a great nation because of its liberalism.

27.

Hugh Trevor-Roper argued that the middle years of the 17th century in Western Europe saw a widespread break-down in politics, economics and society caused by demographic, social, religious, economic and political problems.

28.

Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote that in his opinion far too many British historians had allowed themselves to be persuaded of the theory that the outbreak of war in 1914 had been the fault of all the great powers.

29.

Hugh Trevor-Roper claimed that this theory had been promoted by the German government's policy of selective publication of documents, aided and abetted by most German historians in a policy of "self-censorship".

30.

Hugh Trevor-Roper praised Rohl for finding and publishing two previously secret documents that showed German responsibility for the war.

31.

In 1973, Hugh Trevor-Roper was invited to visit Switzerland to examine a manuscript entitled Decadence Mandchoue written by the sinologist Sir Edmund Backhouse in a mixture of English, French, Latin and Chinese that had been in the custody of Reinhard Hoeppli, a Swiss diplomat who was the Swiss consul in Beijing during World War II.

32.

However, before doing so they wanted Hugh Trevor-Roper, who as a former MI6 officer was an expert on clandestine affairs, to examine some of the more outlandish claims contained in the text.

33.

Hugh Trevor-Roper established that while Backhouse did indeed raise money for the Wilde defence fund, he spent it all on buying expensive jewellery, especially pearl necklaces, which were a special passion of Backhouse's.

34.

In 1960, Hugh Trevor-Roper waged a successful campaign against the candidacy of Sir Oliver Franks who was backed by the heads of houses marshalled by Maurice Bowra, for the Chancellorship of the University of Oxford, helping the then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to be elected instead.

35.

In 1964, Hugh Trevor-Roper edited a Festschrift in honour of his friend Sir Keith Feiling's 80th birthday.

36.

Critics of Hugh Trevor-Roper's claim have questioned the validity of systematic interpretations of the African past, whether by materialist, Annalist or the traditional historical methods used by Hugh Trevor-Roper.

37.

The nadir of his career came in 1983, when as a director of The Times, Hugh Trevor-Roper made statements that authenticated the so-called Hitler Diaries.

38.

The ensuing fiasco gave Hugh Trevor-Roper's enemies the opportunity to criticise him openly, while Hugh Trevor-Roper's initial endorsement of the diaries raised questions about his integrity: The Sunday Times, a newspaper to which he regularly contributed book reviews and of which he was an independent director, had already paid a considerable sum for the right to serialise the diaries if and only if they were genuine.

39.

Hugh Trevor-Roper explained that he had been given assurances about how the diaries had come into the possession of their "discoverer", and about the age of the paper and ink used in them and of their authenticity.

40.

Hugh Trevor-Roper did not find it normal that fellows should wear mourning on the anniversary of General Franco's death, attend parties in SS uniform or insult black and Jewish guests at high table.

41.

On 4 October 1954, Hugh Trevor-Roper married Lady Alexandra Henrietta Louisa Howard-Johnston, eldest daughter of Field Marshal Earl Haig by his wife, the former Hon.

42.

Hugh Trevor-Roper was made a life peer in 1979 on the recommendation of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

43.

Hugh Trevor-Roper was raised to the Peerage on 27 September 1979, and was introduced to the House of Lords as Baron Dacre of Glanton, of Glanton in the County of Northumberland.

44.

Hugh Trevor-Roper had her cousin, Anthony Brand, 6th Viscount Hampden, "as titular head of the Brand family", inform Trevor-Roper that the Dacre title belonged to the Brand family "and no-one else should breach their monopoly", on the grounds of the title's antiquity of over six centuries.

45.

Hugh Trevor-Roper underwent cataract surgery and obtained a magnifying machine, which allowed him to continue writing.

46.

In 2002, at the age of 88, Hugh Trevor-Roper submitted a sizable article on Thomas Sutton, the founder of Charterhouse School, to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in part with notes he had written decades earlier, which editor Brian Harrison praised as "the work of a master".

47.

Hugh Trevor-Roper suffered several other minor ailments related to his advanced age, but according to his stepson, "bore all his difficulties stoically and without complaint".

48.

The third book was The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History, a critique written in the mid-1970s of what Hugh Trevor-Roper regarded as the myths of Scottish nationalism.

49.

The Wartime Journals are from the journals that Hugh Trevor-Roper kept during his years in the Secret Intelligence Service.