Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson, ed Richard Davenport-Hines

Just don't mention the diaries

When Hugh Trevor-Roper died in January 2003, the obituaries were respectful, but muted. They paid tribute, of course, to his great qualities as a historian, and especially to the leading, and sometimes controversial role he had played at Oxford as Regius Professor of Modern History between 1957 and his retirement in 1980, when he crossed over to Cambridge to stir up trouble among the Fellows of Peterhouse as their new Master.

Nevertheless, there was the inescapable feeling that, had he died two decades earlier, the posthumous tributes paid to him might have been fuller and more generous. In 1983, the scandal of the so-called Hitler Diaries had exploded, causing irreparable damage to Trevor-Roper's professional reputation, and raising doubts about his personal integrity. Trevor-Roper had authenticated the diaries, famously discovered in a hay loft, and when they were subsequently exposed as forgeries, he was accused of a conflict of interest. Although he denied acting dishonestly, Trevor-Roper was at that time a director of Times Newspapers, and the Sunday Times had paid a hefty sum to serialise the diaries in Britain.

The shadow cast by this episode extended over the rest of Trevor-Roper's life, and one of the fortunate by-products of the publication of these letters is that they remind us of what a brilliant, witty and learned writer Trevor-Roper could be. He was at his best as a miniaturist. Although he won acclaim as a young don in 1940 for his biography of Archbishop Laud, followed in 1947 by his bestselling dissection of The Last Days of Hitler, he never continued this success with the great work of historical scholarship that many believed him to be capable of (a book on Robert Cecil, minister under Elizabeth I and James I, a study of the Roman Catholic Revival in 19th-century England are just two of the titles Trevor-Roper mentions to Berenson in the course of this correspondence, which he failed to bring to fruition). As a result, up to now, Trevor-Roper's reputation as a writer has rested on his achievements as an essayist, though on the evidence of this volume his gifts as a letter-writer may soon be widely recognised.

Trevor-Roper first met the famous art connoisseur and critic Bernard Berenson in 1947. Berenson, at 82, was immured at I Tatti, the villa outside Florence which he had transformed into an immaculate shrine to his artistic taste, living with his companion Nicky Mariano; Trevor-Roper, driving around Tuscany in the Bentley he had bought from the proceeds of The Last Days of Hitler, was a historian at Christ Church, Oxford. In his diary a decade later, Berenson wrote that Trevor-Roper was "Cock-sure, arrogant, but without insolence... Seems to have known everybody, or at least everybody who has counted, the last 30 years. Can recite entire sagas about them." He added that his young friend was "A fascinating letter-writer, indeed an epistolary artist..."

Berenson craved information from the outside world, and he idealised Oxford University. In long letters written over 12 years, until Berenson's death in October 1959, Trevor-Roper was able to satisfy him on both counts. Trevor-Roper was ambivalent about the university, but he was also fascinated by its ancient, creaky machinery, and never more so than when it came to the subterfuge of an Oxford election. In one letter, he describes the election of a new Warden of All Souls with "the crescendo of buzzing in the alcoves, the feverish motion from staircase to staircase in these normally somnolent quadrangles". He is unsparing about his colleagues - A L Rowse is "a Cornish egomaniac", A J P Taylor, "the Tom Paine of British Television" - and scathing about the productivity of the average Oxford don. One candidate for a professorial chair is described as having produced, in 25 years, "two slender articles" about the reign of Elizabeth I. "I am sure they are exact and competent articles; but since the author of them touches nothing that he does not dessicate, I cannot find anyone who has read them." Above all, Trevor-Roper loves controversy and the scent of battle, whether it's demolishing the rival historian Lawrence Stone - "he decided to get well known quickly; and the terrifying thing is that he succeeded" - or proposing Himmler's masseur, who had saved Jews from Nazi captivity, for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In the wider world, high society gossip is conveyed with superb malice. George VI is being killed by his domestic surgeon, "a brassy Scot", who has put the king on a diet of herbs, and removed one of his lungs: "afterwards the royal lung was devoutly carried, wrapped up in The Times newspaper". The Duchess of Roxburgh is being starved out of the ducal home by the Duke, while, throughout, Berenson is kept informed of Trevor-Roper's own romantic travails as he tries to win Xandra, daughter of Earl Haig, from her unsympathetic husband, a man who rather than carrying a photo of his wife and children, carries one of himself with a large fish.

These letters offer sheer, unadulterated pleasure. Richard Davenport-Hines has written an enjoyably astute introduction, and provided judicious annotation (though Amy Robsart is not just a fictional character, she's a historical one too). If the laws of libel permit, future volumes collecting letters to other correspondents may follow. In the meantime, this one has certainly whetted my appetite for the forthcoming biography of Trevor-Roper by Adam Sisman.