One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper

In a letter to Gerald Brenan in March 1968, Hugh Trevor-Roper stated in the simplest terms his aesthetic position: "I find more pleasure in good literature than in dull (even if true) history." Trevor-Roper had boundless admiration for Brenan, a non-academic, self-taught scholar whose 1943 book The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War had become a classic. Earlier in the same letter, Trevor-Roper paid his friend and colleague the highest compliment: "Ever since I read The Spanish Labyrinth I have looked upon you as my ideal historian – you see the past in the present, and the present in the past, imaginatively, and yet with corrective scholarship, and you express it in perfect prose."

This characterisation could be applied equally well to Trevor-Roper himself. As a historian, he had the finest prose style since Gibbon, one of his abiding heroes ("I think I would rather be thought to write like Gibbon than any other writer of English"); and indeed, for clarity of expression and beauty of form he often outstripped the chronicler of imperial Rome.

Hard work was the engine that drove Trevor-Roper's success. By the time his education was finished – if education ever does finish – he had read all the Greek and Latin classics, and much else besides. In 1942, when he was 28, he noted in his journal: "Since the war began, I have reread a great deal of literature, including all Homer, Pindar, Thucydides, Lucretius, Horace, and much of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton and Tennyson …" Not read, mind you, but reread. Nor was it all pleasure: as he ruefully observed, a scholar must grind his way through many dusty, dull and even worthless books if his own work is to have the sparkle of mastery. 

And sparkle it did, and does. He was surely the best-read historian of his age, yet the labour never shows; his midnight oil must have been of the lightest extra-virgin variety. As the editors write in their introduction to this volume: "Trevor-Roper's refusal to be confined to a single historical period or to monolingual sources, still less to any specialist topic, set him apart from those of his contemporaries who wrote big books on the subjects on which they had concentrated at length."