Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography
Nov 2012 · Hachette UK
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320
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About this ebook
'Magnificent ... riveting' Susan Hill
'It is a long time since I have enjoyed a book as much as this one' Robert Harris
'This is an outstanding biography of a fascinating and brilliant man' Sunday Telegraph
Hugh Trevor-Roper's life is a rich subject for a biography - with elements of Greek tragedy, comedy and moments of high farce. Clever, witty and sophisticated, Trevor-Roper was the most brilliant historian of his generation. Until his downfall, he seemed to have everything: wealth and connections, a chair at Oxford, a beautiful country house, an aristocratic wife, and, eventually, a title of his own. Eloquent and versatile, fearless and formidable, he moved easily between Oxford and London, between the dreaming spires of scholarship and the jostling corridors of power. He developed a lucid prose style which he used to deadly effect. He was notorious for his acerbic attacks on other historians, but ultimately tainted his own reputation with a catastrophic error when he authenticated the forged 'Hitler Diaries'.
Adam Sisman sheds new light on this fascinating and dramatic episode, but also shows that there was much more to Hugh Trevor-Roper's career than the fiasco of the Hitler Diaries hoax that became his epitaph. From wartime code-breaking to grilling Nazis while the trail was still fresh in 1945 (and finding Hitler's will buried inside a bottle), to his wide-ranging interests, his snobbery and his malice, his formidable post-war feuds with Evelyn Waugh, Tawney, Toynbee, Taylor and many others, and his secret and passionate affair with an older, married woman. A study in both success and failure, Adam Sisman's biography is a revealing and personal story of a remarkable life.
'It is a long time since I have enjoyed a book as much as this one' Robert Harris
'This is an outstanding biography of a fascinating and brilliant man' Sunday Telegraph
Hugh Trevor-Roper's life is a rich subject for a biography - with elements of Greek tragedy, comedy and moments of high farce. Clever, witty and sophisticated, Trevor-Roper was the most brilliant historian of his generation. Until his downfall, he seemed to have everything: wealth and connections, a chair at Oxford, a beautiful country house, an aristocratic wife, and, eventually, a title of his own. Eloquent and versatile, fearless and formidable, he moved easily between Oxford and London, between the dreaming spires of scholarship and the jostling corridors of power. He developed a lucid prose style which he used to deadly effect. He was notorious for his acerbic attacks on other historians, but ultimately tainted his own reputation with a catastrophic error when he authenticated the forged 'Hitler Diaries'.
Adam Sisman sheds new light on this fascinating and dramatic episode, but also shows that there was much more to Hugh Trevor-Roper's career than the fiasco of the Hitler Diaries hoax that became his epitaph. From wartime code-breaking to grilling Nazis while the trail was still fresh in 1945 (and finding Hitler's will buried inside a bottle), to his wide-ranging interests, his snobbery and his malice, his formidable post-war feuds with Evelyn Waugh, Tawney, Toynbee, Taylor and many others, and his secret and passionate affair with an older, married woman. A study in both success and failure, Adam Sisman's biography is a revealing and personal story of a remarkable life.
About the author
Adam Sisman is the author of three previous biographies, all very well received by the critics. His first book, published in 1994, was a life of Trevor-Roper's colleague and rival, A.J.P. Taylor, lauded by the late Roy Jenkins as 'one of the most succinct, complete and satisfying biographies I have read for a long time'. Sisman's Boswell's Presumptuous Task, which appeared in 1999, was praised as 'extraordinarily gripping' and 'wonderfully vivid' by Richard Holmes, and as 'fabulously entertaining, deft and witty' by Philip Hensher; it was shortlisted for various prizes, including the Whitbread, and won the Biography Prize awarded by the American National Books Critics Circle. In 2006 Sisman published a much-admired study of the friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge, described by Diana Athill as 'unputdownable'.
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