The last days of Hugh Trevor-Roper: how a historian who reveled in destroying the reputations of others ruined his own.

• Author: O'Donnell, Michael
• Position: An Honourable Englishman: The Life of Hugh Trevor-Roper - Book review

An Honourable Englishman: The Life of Hugh Trevor-Roper

by Adam Sisman

Random House, 672 pp.

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Such is the hunger for new books about Nazi Germany that authors have begun chronicling the chroniclers. Last autumn Newsday editor Steve Wick wrote The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a history of the famous journalist's dispatches from Berlin in the 1930s. The latest arrival in this genre is Adam Sisman's An Honourable Englishman: The Life of Hugh TrevorRoper, a portrait of one of the most stylish historians of Adolph Hitler. This type of book is bizarre: the reader already knows about the Third Reich, yet can watch someone else learning about it for the first time and in this way refresh the horror. Whether or not the publishing trend is a gimmick, it can produce fine books. An Honourable Englishman is witty, incisive, and hugely entertaining.

It is worth reading for two reasons. First, it is a model of the biography form. Sisman is a superb writer who masterfully presents his subject--to the point where the reader somehow becomes invested in minutiae like Trevor-Roper's decision to move from England to Scotland or to replace a Bentley with a Mercedes. The second reason is the rare pleasure of a book properly shelved in the shrinking Intellectual History section of the library. Reading about Trevor-Roper-Hitler chaser, Oxbridge don, occasional foreign correspondent, bomb thrower-means doing one's learning collaterally, like taking in the fine view on a train ride that gets you from here to there. Strictly speaking, the book's subject is a fusty old professor, but its pleasures and insights range far wider.

Trevor-Roper's great work was The Last Days of Hitler (1947), which established the fact of Hitler's suicide and recounted the hallucinogenic final days inside the bunker of the Reich Chancellery in April 1945. The slender but authoritative book grew out of an investigative report that Trevor-Roper prepared for British intelligence. The report was commissioned in September 1945, when no one knew for sure whether Hitler was alive or dead. His successor, Admiral Karl Donitz, insisted that he had fought to the last breath against the Soviet army; the Soviets claimed that he was alive and being harbored by the Allies. Rumors flared up like brushfires and were just as hard to stamp out. Hitler was said to be staying "on a mist-enshrouded island in the Baltic; in a Rhineland...