An Honourable Englishman
The Life of Hugh Trevor-Roper
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
He was one of the most gifted scholars of his generation—a brilliant writer, high-society star, and cultural force who moved easily between aristocratic houses and the humble haunts of literary bohemia. He developed a lucid prose style that he used to scathing effect, earning notoriety for his sharp attacks on other historians. Now this superb biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper, universally acclaimed overseas, makes its anticipated American debut.
With incisive knowledge of the man and access to never-before-published letters, Adam Sisman paints a fascinating portrait of this charismatic, contentious, contradictory character. Sisman examines Trevor-Roper’s middle-class upbringing in a house so empty of affection that it caused, as he put it, his “almost physical difficulty in expressing emotion.” He traces Trevor-Roper’s career from his early academic triumphs to his later failure to produce the big book expected of him.
Sisman also provides riveting new details of the high drama of Trevor-Roper’s World War II intelligence work—in which he boldly blew the whistle on bureaucratic infighting that imperiled British code-breaking—and the exclusive investigation of Hitler’s death that inspired his bestselling postwar triumph, The Last Days of Hitler. As never before, Trevor-Roper’s personal life is explored, including his passionate affair with an older, married woman. Finally, An Honourable Englishman reveals the truth behind his public substantiation of the false Hitler diaries in 1983, a misstep (encouraged by his impatient employer Rupert Murdoch) that forever tainted his reputation.
Profoundly bright and brutally acerbic, Hugh Trevor-Roper was a literary lion like no other, and in An Honourable Englishman he receives the absorbing biography he deserves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This superb biography romps through the life of one of 20th-century Britain's most notorious, controversial, and influential historian-journalists. A brilliant if unlikable man, more essayist than book writer, Trevor-Roper seemed to go everywhere, know everyone, and eventually anger, often to the point of detestation, much of the UK's academic and public world. Intellectually pugnacious, he enjoyed attacking fellow historians and excoriated Hannah Arendt's coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. He also fetched up everywhere during WWII in M16, where he helped decipher the Nazi code; at Oxford and Cambridge; and in newspaper boardrooms, in all of which he caused dustups. An influential historian of 17th-century Britain, Trevor-Roper was also known for his unsurpassed study of Hitler's last days and notorious for "authenticating" Hitler's diaries, which turned out to be forgeries. Using never-before-exploited resources, NBCC award-winner Sisman, the much-praised biographer of Trevor-Roper's fellow historian and competitor, A.J.P. Taylor, savors, as he makes us savor, a parade of juicy stories about his subject's life and career and those he knew. Walk-on parts by such characters as Princess Margaret, Rupert Murdoch, Margaret Thatcher, and Albert Speer enliven the tale. Especially for those who delight in knowledge and gossip about Britain's academic culture, public figures, and status-conscious society, this work, though bloated, will be compulsive reading. 24 pages of photos.