One Hundred Letters From Hugh Trevor-Roper - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198703112 ISBN 13: 9780198703112

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2014

Synopsis

The one hundred letters brought together for this book illustrate the range of Hugh Trevor-Roper's life and preoccupations: as an historian, a controversialist, a public intellectual, an adept in academic intrigues, a lover of literature, a traveller, a countryman. They depict a life of rich diversity; a mind of intellectual sparkle and eager curiosity; a character that relished the comedie humaine, and the absurdities, crotchets, and vanities of his contemporaries. The playful irony of Trevor-Roper's correspondence places him in a literary tradition stretching back to such great letter-writers as Madame de Sevigne and Horace Walpole.

Though he generally shunned emotional self-exposure in correspondence as in company, his letters to the woman who became his wife reveal the surprising intensity and the raw depths of his feelings.

Trevor-Roper was one of the most gifted scholars of his generation, and one of the most famous dons of his day. While still a young man, he made his name with his bestseller The Last Days of Hitler, and became notorious for his acerbic assaults on other historians. In his prime, Trevor-Roper appeared to have everything: a grey Bentley, a prestigious chair in Oxford, a beautiful country house, a wife with a title, and, eventually, a title of his own. But he failed to write the 'big book' expected of him, and tainted his reputation when in old age he erroneously authenticated the forged Hitler diaries.

For an academic, Trevor-Roper's interests were extraordinarily wide, bringing him into contact with such diverse individuals as George Orwell and Margaret Thatcher, Albert Speer and Kim Philby, Katharine Hepburn and Rupert Murdoch. The tragicomedy of his tenure as Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, provided an appropriate finale to a career packed with incident.

Trevor-Roper's letters to Bernard Berenson, published as Letters from Oxford in 2006, gave pleasure to a wide variety of readers. This more general selection of his correspondence has been long anticipated, and will delight anyone who values wit, erudition, and clear prose.

About this title

About the Author:

Richard Davenport-Hines is a historian, literary biographer, and former Research Fellow of the London School of Economics. He has edited two previous collections of Hugh Trevor-Roper's writings, Letters from Oxford (2006) and Wartime Journals (2011). His other previous books include Dudley Docker: The Life and Times of a Trade Warrior, for which he won the Wolfson Prize, biographies of W. H. Auden and Marcel Proust, Titanic Lives, and, most recently, An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo.

Adam Sisman is a freelance writer, specializing in biography. His first book was a life of Hugh Trevor-Roper's rival, the historian A.J.P. Taylor (1994), and he has more recently written the authorized biography of Trevor-Roper himself (2010). Sisman's other work includes Boswell's Presumptuous Task (2000), which was awarded the National Books Critics Circle prize for biography, and The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge (2006). He is currently at work on a life of John le Carre.

Review:

"One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper, written through seven decades to a variety of people, provides a more rounded and revealing portrait. As Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman, the collection's insightful editors, note in their introduction: 'The letters are distillations of a historian's wisdom.' Trevor-Roper's private self, at least in these letters, was not always nice, but it was often wise."--Martin Rubin, Wall Street Journal

"One of the greatest prose stylists in the English language."--John Banville, The New York Review of Books reviewing Trevor-Roper's Wartime Journals

"Hugh Trevor-Roper was probably the greatest letter writer of what Noel Annan called 'our age', corresponding with almost anybody who was anybody, and in a style that was both inimitable and incomparable. This latest anthology is by turns memorable, fascinating, wicked and malicious, and impossible to put down."--Sir David Cannadine

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0198703112
• ISBN 13: 9780198703112
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 488
• Editor: Davenport-Hines Richard, Sisman Adam