Introducing Mr. Trevor-Roper.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: 'Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography' - Book review

Adam Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010), 648 pp., 25.00 [pounds sterling].

The overweening historian is a recurrent figure in British literature over the past century. Brilliantly talented and flamboyant, he--it is invariably a "he"--seeks, more often than not, adulation and celebrity as much as scholarly acclaim. In Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, for example, there is the historian as social climber. Mr. Samgrass of All Souls is an obsessive chronicler of the aristocracy. Eager to ingratiate himself with the cold and austere Lady Marchmain, Samgrass tries to rein in her son Sebastian, a wastrel who flits from one Oxford drinking club to the next, clutching his little teddy bear Aloysius. After Sebastian and his chums are arrested and jailed during one of their boozy, late-night escapades, Samgrass gets him off the hook by testifying not only that he possesses a faultless character but also that an exceptional scholarly career is endangered. A holiday trip to the Levant with Sebastian follows. His tutor loses sight of him in Athens, but "Sammy," as Sebastian loves to deride him, continues his travels to Egypt on Lady Marchmain's dime, only to be caught out once he returns after Christmas and visits the Brideshead manse where "guilt hung about him like stale cigar smoke." Yet Samgrass contrives to remain indispensable to Lady Marchmain, basking in her and the castle's reflected glory.

Then there is Anthony Powell's opus A Dance to the Music of Time. It features the historian as a would-be man of political influence. The Oxford don Sillery's weekly tea parties are where introductions are made and "young peers and heirs to fortune were not, of course, unwelcome." Sillery is an inveterate schemer whose

understanding of human nature ... [and] unusual ingenuity of mind were both employed ceaselessly in discovering undergraduate connexions which might be of use to him; so that from what he liked to call "my backwater"--the untidy room, furnished, as he would remark, like a boarding-house parlour--he sometimes found himself able to exercise a respectable modicum of influence in a larger world. Most recently, Alan Bennett tackled this genre in his popular play The History Boys, which stars the historian as provocateur. Based largely on conservative historian Niall Ferguson, the protagonist is named Irwin. He explains to his young charges, "Truth is no more at issue in an examination than thirst at a wine-tasting or fashion at a striptease." History is as much a sport as it is a profession for Irwin. The true danger isn't being wrong; it's being boring.

Where does Hugh Trevor-Roper--Regius Professor at Oxford, Master of Peterhouse, Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The National Interest. fellow of the British Academy and national independent director of the Times Newspapers, to name a few of his prizes--fit into this pantheon? To some extent he was a social climber, political intriguer and intellectual bomb thrower. For one thing, he could be a terrible snob. At his inaugural lecture for the Regius Professorship, he kept four rows in front empty for the aristocratic "quality" that he expected to arrive from London. "It was terrible to see aged dons and white-haired ladies rudely pushed away from these empty places," his friend Isaiah Berlin observed in a letter. "In the end ... nobody came and the seats were filled by plebeians." It is also the case that he was constantly embroiled in academic feuds, curried favor with politicians such as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and tooled around in a gray Bentley. Hauteur, ambition and zest for giving offense--these propensities earned him numerous enemies, who dubbed him "Pleasure-sloper."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

But he was also vied for by editors and publishers in England and the United States. The historian Christopher Hill announced in 1957 that "if Professor Trevor-Roper did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." Trevor-Roper took care of that himself. He published his first book, at the age of twenty-five, on the seventeenth-century divine William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of Charles I. Yet Trevor-Roper's record included the failure, pointed out to him ad nauseam by his numerous detractors, to produce a magnum opus. Margaret Thatcher, who had bestowed upon him the title Lord Dacre of Glanton in 1979, later went on to harangue him as though he were a delinquent student in the summer of 1982 at a dinner party at 10 Downing Street: "So, Lord Dacre, and when can we expect another book from you?" He responded, "Well, Prime Minister, I have one on the stocks." The Iron Lady's response? "On the stocks? On the stocks? A fat lot of good that is! In the shops, that is where we need it!"

He married into the aristocracy (his wife was Lady Alexandra Henrietta Louisa Howard-Johnston, ex-wife of Rear Admiral Clarence Dinsmore Howard-Johnston and daughter of the controversial World War I general Douglas Haig). Like Mr. Samgrass, Trevor-Roper was never happier than when mingling with grandees in a country house. His wife's dream came true when in 1983 she and her husband were invited to dinner with Queen Elizabeth--as a divorced and remarried woman, she had long been shunned by the highest reaches of the nobility. Redemption was at hand. But Trevor-Roper suffered a terrible blow when, at the behest of Rupert Murdoch, who had just acquired the Times, he hastily endorsed the Hitler diaries as authentic. Stern magazine, a popular weekly based in Hamburg, had first touted the diaries; they were quickly revealed...