Dominic Sandbrook
Country House Don
Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography
By Adam Sisman
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 598pp £25 order from our bookshop
Fifty years ago, no intellectual rivalry in Britain was more celebrated than that between the two Oxford historians A J P Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper. To the press they seemed deadly antagonists: on the one hand, the irreverent, populist, television-loving Lancashire leftie; on the other, the flippant, donnish, Tory-voting hunting enthusiast. In fact they got on rather well, but since the rivalry made such good copy they were perfectly happy to play up to it. When Taylor published his controversial The Origins of the Second World War in 1961, it was Trevor-Roper who issued the fiercest denunciation. The book, he wrote in Encounter, ‘will do harm, perhaps irreparable harm, to [Taylor’s] reputation as a serious historian’. But it was Taylor who had the last word – and a devastating one, at that. ‘The Regius Professor’s methods of quotation’, he replied in a later issue, ‘might also do harm to his reputation as a serious historian, if he had one’.
Whether Adam Sisman’s excellent biography will do much for Trevor-Roper’s reputation, if he has one, strikes me as very doubtful. The man who beat Taylor to Oxford’s Regius Chair of Modern History belongs to a long-vanished age, when national news magazines were more likely to publish long essays
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘We know that Ballard was many things – novelist, fabulist, one-time assistant editor of “British Baker”, seer of Shepperton, poet laureate of airports. But, it seems, he was not a fan of Mrs Dalloway.’
Joanna Kavenna - Unlimited Dream Company
Joanna Kavenna: Unlimited Dream Company - Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007 by J G Ballard (Edited by Mark Blacklock)
literaryreview.co.uk
“Remember when being Bono was uncool?” I’m back in my favourite lit mag @Lit_Review for their Christmas special, writing about Lou Reed and his new biography: https://literaryreview.co.uk/walks-on-the-wild-side
'Lord of the Flies meets The 120 Days of Sodom.' Some thoughts on the decline and fall of India’s Princely States for @Lit_Review: