Hugh Trevor-Roper

Hugh Trevor-Roper
Trevor-Roper in 1960.
Born	Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper (1914-01-15)15 January 1914 Glanton, Northumberland, England
Died	26 January 2003(2003-01-26) (aged 89) Oxford
Nationality	English
Education	Belhaven Hill School Charterhouse School
Alma mater	Christ Church, Oxford
Occupation	Historian
Known for	His studies in 17th-century European history
Title	Regius Professor of Modern History
Term	1957–1980
Predecessor	Vivian Hunter Galbraith
Successor	Michael Howard
Spouse(s)	Alexandra Henrietta Louisa Howard-Johnston
Children	three step-children

Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper (15 January 1914 – 27 January 2003) was an English historian of early modern Britain and Nazi Germany and Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. He was made a life peer in 1979 on the advice of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, choosing the title Baron Dacre of Glanton.

Trevor-Roper was known for his lively intellectual controversies with fellow historians. His most commercially successful book emerged from his assignment as a British intelligence officer in 1945 to discover what happened in the last days of Hitler's bunker. From his interviews with a range of witnesses and study of surviving documents he demonstrated to the satisfaction of most analysts that Hitler was dead and had not escaped from Berlin. His book The Last Days of Hitler was a popular and critical success. However, his reputation was seriously damaged in 1983 when after a brief examination he authenticated the Hitler Diaries, which were subsequently shown to be forgeries.

Early life and education

Trevor-Roper was born in Glanton, Northumberland, England, the son of a doctor, and the brother of Patrick Trevor-Roper (who became a leading eye surgeon and gay rights activist). Trevor-Roper was educated at Belhaven, Charterhouse and at Christ Church, Oxford, in Classics and Modern History, later moving to Merton College, Oxford, as a research fellow. Trevor-Roper took a first in Classical Moderations in 1934 and won the Craven, the Ireland and the Hertford scholarships in Classics. Initially, he intended to make his career in the Classics, but became bored with what he regarded as the pedantic technical aspects of the Greats course at Oxford, and switched to History, where he obtained an honours first in 1936. Trevor-Roper's first book was a 1940 biography of Archbishop William Laud, in which he challenged many of the prevailing perceptions surrounding Laud.

Military service in World War II

During World War II, Trevor-Roper served as an officer in the Radio Security Service of the Secret Intelligence Service, and then on the interception of messages from the German intelligence service, the Abwehr. He came to have a low opinion of the pre-war professional intelligence agents but a higher one of post-1939 recruits such as Kim Philby. But in The Philby Affair (1968) Trevor-Roper argues that Philby was never in a position to undermine efforts by the Chief of German Military Intelligence Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, to overthrow the Nazi regime and negotiate with the British government.

Investigating Hitler's last days

In November 1945, Trevor-Roper was ordered by Dick White, then head of counter-intelligence in the British sector of Berlin to investigate the circumstances of Adolf Hitler's death, and to rebut the Soviet propaganda that Hitler was alive and living in the West. Using the alias of Major Oughton, Trevor-Roper interviewed politicians, military men, and supporting staff who had been present in the Führerbunker with Hitler, and who had been able to escape to the West, including Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven. The investigation resulted in Trevor-Roper's most famous book, The Last Days of Hitler (1947, with revised editions as late as 1995), in which he described the last ten days of Hitler's life, and the fates of some of the higher-ranking members of the inner circle as well of key lesser figures. Trevor-Roper transformed the evidence he gathered 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 Thomas Babington Macaulay. Trevor-Roper claimed he received a death threat from someone in Portugal who claimed to represent the Stern Gang for exalting Hitler.

Anti-communism

In June 1950, Trevor-Roper attended a conference in Berlin of anti-Communist intellectuals such as Sidney Hook, Melvin J. Lasky, Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron and Franz Borkenau that resulted in the founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its magazine Encounter. In the 1950s and 1960s, he served as a frequent contributor to Encounter, but he had reservations about what he regarded as the over-didactic tone of some of its contributors, particularly Koestler and Borkenau.

Academic controversies

Trevor-Roper was famous for his writing style (see above). In his reviews and essays he could be pitilessly sarcastic, and devastating in his mockery. In his attack on Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History, he accused him as regarding himself as a Messiah complete with "the youthful Temptations; the missionary Journeys; the Miracles; the Revelations; the Agony".

For Trevor-Roper, the major themes of early modern Europe were its intellectual vitality, and the quarrels between Protestant and Catholic states, the latter being outpaced by the former, both economically and constitutionally. In Trevor-Roper's view, one of the major themes of early modern Europe was that of expansion. By expansion, he meant both overseas expansion in the form of colonies and intellectual expansion in the form of the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. In Trevor-Roper's view, the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries were part of the reaction against doctrinal pluralism, and were ultimately traced back to the conflict between the rational worldview of such thinkers as Desiderius Erasmus and the spiritual values of the Reformation.

Trevor-Roper argued that history should be understood as an art, not a science, and that the key attribute of a successful historian was their power of imagination. For Trevor-Roper, history is full of contingency, and the past is neither a story of continuous advance nor continuous decline, but is rather resolved by accident and through the particular choices made by particular individuals made at the time in question. Though Trevor-Roper often acknowledged the impact of social trends upon history, in his view, it was the actions of the individuals that made the difference. In his studies of early modern Europe, Trevor-Roper did not focus exclusively upon political history, but sought to examine the interaction between the political, intellectual, social and religious trends of the period. His preferred medium for expressing himself was the essay rather the book. In his essays in social history, written during the 1950s and '60s, Trevor-Roper was increasingly influenced by the work of — the French Annales School, especially Fernand Braudel, and did much to introduce the work of the Annales school to the English-speaking world.

English Civil War

In 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. For him, the dispute was over issues of free will and predestination, of preaching and the importance of the sacraments, and only later over the structure of the Church of England. The Puritans desired a more decentralized and egalitarian church with an emphasis on the laity, while the Arminians wished for ordered church with a firm hierarchy, with an emphasis on divine right and salvation via free will.

As a historian of early modern Britain, Trevor-Roper was known for his disputes with fellow historians such as Lawrence Stone and Christopher Hill, whose materialist (and in some measure "inevitablist") explanations of the English Civil War he enthusiastically attacked. Trevor-Roper was a leading player in the so-called "storm over the gentry" (also known as the "gentry controversy"), a dispute with Christian Socialist R. H. Tawney and Stone about whether the English gentry were, economically, on the way down or up in the century before the English Civil War, and whether this had anything to do with the outbreak of that war in 1642.

Stone, Tawney and Hill all argued that the gentry were rising economically, and that this caused the Civil War. Trevor-Roper argued that, while office-holders and lawyers were prospering, the lesser gentry were in decline and that that one reason for the Civil War. A third group, grouped around J. H. Hexter and Geoffrey Elton, argued that the causes of the Civil War had nothing to do with the gentry. In 1948, a paper put forward by Stone in support of Tawney's thesis was vigorously attacked by Trevor-Roper, who showed that Stone had exaggerated the debt problems of the Tudor nobility. He then attacked 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.

Second World War and Hitler

Trevor-Roper's attacks on the philosophies of history advanced by Arnold J. Toynbee and Edward Hallett Carr, and on his colleague A. J. P. Taylor's account of the origins of Second World War, were also widely noted.^{[citation needed]} Another dispute was with Taylor and Alan Bullock over the question of whether Adolf Hitler had any fixed aims or not. In the 1950s, Trevor-Roper was ferocious in his criticism of Bullock for his portrayal of Hitler as a “mountebank” (i.e., opportunistic adventurer) instead of the ideologue that Trevor-Roper believed him to be.^{[citation needed]} When Taylor offered a picture of Hitler similar to Bullock's in his 1961 book The Origins of the Second World War, the debate continued, very publicly, between Taylor and Trevor-Roper.^{[citation needed]}Another feud was with the novelist and Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh, who saw Trevor-Roper as a severe critic of the Catholic Church, and was often vocal in expressing his criticism of him^{[citation needed]}.

In the Globalist-Continentalist debate between those who argued that Hitler had as his aim the conquest of the entire world, and those who argued that he sought only the conquest of the continent of Europe, Trevor-Roper was one of the leading Continentalists. He argued that the Globalist case rested upon a scattering of Hitler's remarks made over several decades and attempting to turn these into a systematic ideology. In his opinion, the only consistent objective Hitler sought was the domination of Europe.^{[citation needed]}

General crisis of the 17th century

A notable thesis propagated by Trevor-Roper was the “general crisis of the 17th century.” He 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. In this “general crisis,” various events, such as the English Civil War, the Fronde in France, the climax of the Thirty Years' War in Germany, troubles in the Netherlands, and revolts against the Spanish Crown in Portugal, Naples and Catalonia, were all manifestations of the same problems. The most important causes of the “general crisis,” in Trevor-Roper’s opinion, were conflicts between “Court” and “Country”; that is between the increasingly powerful centralizing, bureaucratic, sovereign princely states, represented by the court, and the traditional, regional, land-based aristocracy and gentry, representing the country. In addition, the religious and intellectual changes introduced by the Reformation and the Renaissance were important secondary causes of the "general crisis."

The “general crisis” thesis generated controversy between those, such as the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who believed in the thesis, but saw the problems of 17th-century Europe as more social and economic in origin than Trevor-Roper would allow. A third faction comprised those who simply denied there was any “general crisis,” for example the Dutch historian Ivo Schöffer, the Danish historian Niels Steengsgaard, and the Soviet historian A.D. Lublinskaya. Trevor-Roper's "general crisis" thesis provoked much discussion, which led to experts in 17th century history such as Roland Mousnier, J. H. Elliott, Lawrence Stone, E. H. Kossmann, Eric Hobsbawm and J. H. Hexter to become advocates of the pros and cons of the theory.

At times, the discussion became quite heated; the Italian Marxist historian Rosario Villari, speaking of the work of Trevor-Roper and Mousnier, claimed that: "The hypothesis of imbalance between bureaucratic expansion and the needs of the state is too vague to be plausible, and rests on inflated rhetoric, typical of a certain type of political conservative, rather than on effective analysis." Villari accused Trevor-Roper of downgrading the importance of what Villari called the English Revolution (the usual Marxist term for the English Civil War), and insisted that the "general crisis" was part of a Europe-wide revolutionary movement. Another Marxist critic of Trevor-Roper was the Soviet historian A. D. Lublinskaya, who attacked the concept of a conflict between "Court" and "Country" as fiction, and argued there was no "general crisis;" instead he maintained that the so-called "general crisis" was merely the emergence of capitalism.

First World War

In 1973, Trevor-Roper in the foreword to a book by John Röhl endorsed the view that Germany was largely responsible for World War I. 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. He went on to note 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." He praised Röhl for finding and publishing two previously secret documents that showed German responsibility for the war.

Backhouse frauds

One of Trevor-Roper's most successful later books was his 1976 biography of the Sinologist Sir Edmund Backhouse, 2nd Baronet (1873–1944), who had long been regarded as a leading expert on China. In his biography, Trevor-Roper exposed Backhouse's life-story, and virtually all of his scholarship, as a fraud. The discrediting of Backhouse as a source led to much of China's history being re-written in the West as many of Backhouse's assertions, such as his claim that the Dowager Empress ordered the murder of her son, were proven to be false.^{[citation needed]}

Influence

In 1960, 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, and had his friend and publisher the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan elected instead.^{[citation needed]} In 1964, Trevor-Roper edited a festschrift in honor of his friend, Sir Keith Feiling's 80th birthday. In 1970, he was undoubtedly the author of The Letters Of Mercurius, a satirical work on the student revolts and university politics of the late 1960s.^{[citation needed]}

The extent of Trevor-Roper’s influence can be seen in the list of prominent contributors to History and the Imagination, the festschrift in his honor. Some of the more notable contributors were Sir Geoffrey Elton, John Clive, Arnaldo Momigliano, Frances Yates, Jeremy Catto, Robert S. Lopez, Michael Howard, David S. Katz, Dimitri Obolensky, J.H. Elliott, Richard Cobb, Walter Pagel, Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl, and Fernand Braudel.

The topics contributed by this group of American, British, French, Russian, Italian, Israeli, Canadian, and German historians extended from whether the Odyssey was a part of an oral tradition that was later written down, to the question of the responsibility for the Jameson Raid.

Debates on African history

Another aspect of Trevor-Roper’s general outlook on history and on scholarly research that has inspired controversy is his viewpoint on historical experiences of pre-literate societies. Evoking Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon and — especially — Hegel, in 1963 he made the now-famous remark that Africa had no history prior to European exploration and colonization, saying rather that “there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness." and describing its past only as "the unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe." These comments, recapitulated in a later article which called Africa “unhistoric”, were criticized by Africanists in various fields of academia, spurring intense debate between historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and in the emerging fields of postcolonial and cultural studies about the definition of “history."

The conflict centers around what must be present in order for a society to qualify as having a “history,” Trevor-Roper arguing that it required documented evidence. Many historians agreed with this central claim but think historical evidence should also include oral traditions as well as written history, which had previously been the litmus test for a society having left "prehistory" behind. Critics of Trevor-Roper’s claim have questioned the validity of systematic interpretations of the African past, whether by materialist, Annalist, or, like Trevor-Roper, traditional historical methods. Some argue that all approaches which compare Africa with Europe or directly integrate it into European history cannot be an accurate description of African societies and cultures. Nevertheless, although virtually all scholars now agree that Africa qualifies as having a “history," Trevor-Roper's statements played an indirect, but important role in the development of post-colonial African studies by motivating wide-ranging discussions about Africa’s role in the present and historical world.

Election as Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge

At the age of sixty-seven, he became Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge. His election, which surprised his contemporaries, was engineered by a group of fellows led by Maurice Cowling, then the leading Peterhouse Historian. Despite this, his relations with the conservative members of the fellowship (and indeed the porters) of Peterhouse subsequently proved to be difficult.

"Hitler Diaries" hoax

The nadir of his career came in 1983, when as a director of The Times he "authenticated" the so-called Hitler Diaries. The opinion among experts in the field was by no means unanimous; David Irving for example, initially decried them as forgeries but subsequently changed his mind and declared that they could be genuine, before finally stating that they were a forgery. Historian Gerhard Weinberg also authenticated the diaries. But within two weeks forensic scientist Julius Grant demonstrated that the diaries were a forgery. The incident gave Trevor-Roper's enemies the opportunity to openly criticise him.

Trevor-Roper's initial endorsement of the diaries raised questions not only about his perspicacity as a historian but also about his integrity, because 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. Trevor-Roper denied any dishonest motivation, explaining that he had been given assurances about how the diaries had come into the possession of their "discoverer" which had been wrong, prompting the satirical magazine Private Eye to nickname him Hugh Very-Ropey (Lord Lucre of Claptout).

Despite the shadow that this incident cast over his later career, he continued to write and publish, and his work continued to be well received.

He was portrayed in the 1991 TV miniseries Selling Hitler by Alan Bennett.

Personal life

On 4 October 1954, Trevor-Roper married Lady Alexandra Henrietta Louisa Howard-Johnston (9 March 1907 – 15 August 1997), eldest daughter of Field Marshal the Earl Haig by his wife, the former Hon. Dorothy Maud Vivian. Lady Alexandra was a goddaughter of Queen Alexandra and had previously been married to Rear-Admiral Clarence Dinsmore Howard-Johnston, by whom she had had three children. There were no children in his own marriage to her.

His brother, Patrick Trevor-Roper, was a leading eye surgeon and prominent gay rights campaigner, one of only three gay individuals willing to testify before the Wolfenden Committee, which was investigating whether British law on this should be changed. His cousin Richard was rear gunner on AJ-G, Guy Gibson's aircraft, in the Dambusters raid and was killed in action over Nuremberg in 1944.

Hugh Trevor-Roper was awarded a life peerage in 1979 and chose the title Baron Dacre of Glanton, of Glanton in the County of Northumberland because he was the great-great-great-grandson of Reverend the Hon. Richard Henry Roper, second and youngest son of Anne, 16th Baroness Dacre, from her second marriage to Henry Roper, 8th Baron Teynham.

He was the first life peer created during Margaret Thatcher's term as Prime Minister.

Trevor-Roper died of cancer in a hospice in Oxford, aged 89. In his last years he had suffered from sight problems leading to visual illusions, problems which were corrected by surgery.

Posthumous books

Five books by Trevor-Roper were published posthumously. The first was Letters from Oxford, a collection of letters written by Trevor-Roper between 1947–59 to his close friend, the American art collector Bernard Berenson. The second book was 2006's Europe’s Physician, an unfinished biography of Sir Theodore de Mayerne, the Franco-Swiss court physician to Henri IV, James I and Charles I. The latter work was largely completed by 1979, but for some unknown reasons was not finished. The third book was The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History, a critique written in the mid-1970s of what Trevor-Roper regarded as the myths of Scottish nationalism. It was published in 2008. The fourth book History and the Enlightenment: Eighteenth Century Essays was published in 2010. The fifth book was The Wartime Journals, edited by Richard Davenport-Hines, published in 2011. The Wartime Journals are from Trevor-Roper's journals that he kept during his years in the Secret Intelligent Service.

Works

• Archbishop Laud, 1573-1645, 1940.
• The Last Days of Hitler, 1947 (revised editions followed, until the last in 1995)
• Secret Conversations, 1941-1944 (published later as Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944), 1953.
• Historical Essays, 1957.
• "The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century" pages 31–64 from Past and Present, Volume 16, 1959.
• "Hitlers Kriegsziele" pages 121–133 from Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitsgeschichte, Volume 8, 1960, translated into English as "Hitler's War Aims" pages 235–250 from Aspects of The Third Reich edited by H.W. Koch, London: Macmillan Ltd, 1985.
• "A. J. P. Taylor, Hitler and the War" pages 86–96 from Encounter, Volume 17, July 1961.
• "E. H. Carr's Success Story" pages 69–77 from Encounter, Volume 84, Issue #104, 1962
• Blitzkrieg to Defeat: Hitler's War Directives, 1939-1945, 1965, 1964.
• Essays in British history presented to Sir Keith Feiling edited by H.R. Trevor-Roper; with a foreword by Lord David Cecil (1964)
• The Rise of Christian Europe, 1965.
• Hitler's Place in History, 1965.
• The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change, and Other Essays, 1967.
• The Age of Expansion, Europe and the World, 1559-1600, edited by Hugh Trevor-Roper, 1968.
• The Philby Affair: Espionage, Treason, and Secret Services, 1968.
• The Romantic Movement and the Study of History: the John Coffin memorial lecture delivered before the University of London on 17 February 1969, 1969.
• The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 1969
• The Plunder of the Arts in the Seventeenth Century, 1970.
• Queen Elizabeth's First Historian: William Camden and the Beginning of English "Civil History", 1971.
• "Fernand Braudel, the Annales, and the Mediterranean," The Journal of Modern History Vol. 44, No. 4, December 1972
• "Foreword" pages 9–16 from 1914: Delusion or Design The Testimony of Two German Diplomats edited by John Röhl, 1973.
• A Hidden Life: The Enigma of Sir Edmund Backhouse (published in the U.S. as The Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse), 1976.
• Princes and Artists: Patronage and Ideology at Four Habsburg Courts, 1517-1633, 1976.
• History and Imagination: A Valedictory Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 20 May 1980, 1980.
• Renaissance Essays, 1985.
• Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth Century Essays, 1987.
• From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution, 1992.
• Edward Gibbon - The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1 introduction (London: Everyman's Library, 1993).
• Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson. Edited by Richard Davenport-Hines. L.: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006, ISBN 0-297-85084-9.
• Europe’s Physician: The Various Life of Sir Theodore De Mayerne, 2007, ISBN 0-300-11263-7.
• The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History, 2008, ISBN 0-300-13686-2
• History and the Enlightenment: Eighteenth Century Essays, 2010, ISBN 0-300-13934-9
• The Wartime Journals: Hugh Trevor-Roper, Edited by Richard Davenport-Hines, 2011 ISBN 1-84885-990-2.

See also

• List of books by or about Adolf Hitler
• Sir Edmund Backhouse, 2nd Baronet

References

• Ascherson, Neal. "Liquidator," London Review of Books Vol. 32 No. 16 · 19 August 2010 pages 10–12
• Lloyd-Jones, Hugh (1981). In Valerie Pearl & Blair Worden. History and Imagination: Essays in Honor of H.R. Trevor-Roper. London: Duckworth. 
• Rabb, Theodore (1975). The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195019563. 
• Robinson, Kristen. "Trevor-Roper, Hugh" pages 1204–1205 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing edited by Kelly Boyd, Volume 2 M-Z, London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1999, ISBN 1-884964-33-8.
• Rosenbaum, Ron (1998). Explaining Hitler: The Search For the Origins Of His Evil. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-679-43151-9. 
• Saleh, Zaki (1958). Trevor-Roper's Critique of Arnold Toynbee: A Symptom of Intellectual Chaos. Baghdad: Al-Ma'eref Press. 
• Sisman, Adam (2010). Hugh Trevor-Roper, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 978-0-297-85214-8; also published as Sisman, Adam (2011). An Honourable Englishman: The Life of Hugh Trevor-Roper. Random House of Canada. 
• Winter, P. R. (12 2007). "A Higher Form of Intelligence: Hugh Trevor-Roper and Wartime British Secret Service". Intelligence and National Security 22 (6): 847–880. doi:10.1080/02684520701770642. 
• “Discussion of H. R. Trevor-Roper: "The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century"” pages 8–42 from Past and Present, No. 18, November 1960 with contributions from Roland Mousnier, J. H. Elliott, Lawrence Stone, H. R. Trevor-Roper, E. H. Kossmann, E. J. Hobsbawm and J. H. Hexter.

External links

About Trevor-Roper

• Michael Knox Beran: H. R. Trevor-Roper, R.I.P, nationalreview.com, January 31, 2003.
• "Lord Dacre of Glanton". The Daily Telegraph (London). 26 January 2003. 
• Barnard, T. (Faculty of History, University of Oxford) Obituary, History Faculty Alumni Newsletter, No. 1, April 2003.
• "Obituary". BBC News. 26 January 2003. 
• Wordern, Blair (27 January 2003). "Obituary". The Guardian (London).  (there are several discrepancies between these sources)
• Silvester, Christopher (16 July 2006). "Review of 'Letters from Oxford', a new edited collection of Trevor-Roper's correspondence with Bernard Berenson in the 1950s". The Times (London). 
• Byers, David (January 27, 2003). "Lord Dacre of Glanton: Obituary". The Times (London). 
• Hunt, Tristram (5 March 2003). "Back when it mattered". The Guardian (London). 
• Silvester, Christopher (16 July 2006). "Review of Letters from Oxford". The Sunday Times (London). 
• Cumming, Laura (6 August 2006). "Review of Letters from Oxford". The Observer (London). 
• "Review of The invention of Scotland". The Daily Telegraph (London). 6 June 2008. 
• "Hugh Trevor-Roper's The Invention of Scotland". 
• The Peerage: Hugh Trevor-Roper

By Trevor-Roper

• The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change, and Other Essays, 1967. full text online

Academic offices
Preceded by Grahame Clark	Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge 1980–1987	Succeeded by Henry Chadwick