Memories are made of this, unfortunately

Poor old Lord Dacre; every newspaper had variations of the headline 'Hitler Diaries Useful Idiot Dies'

I never remotely believed that Robert Burns actually wanted some Power the giftie gie us to see oursels as others see us. It sounds an absolutely frightful thing to request.

On the whole, you never do get to find out what other people think of you, since of course they wouldn't say it while you were hanging around. Only in exceptional cases – the one instance I can think of is Robert Graves, whose death in the First World War proved greatly exaggerated – do you get to read your obituary, where it all comes out. It's all too easy to imagine what Burns's Power, these days, would have to say about him in the obituary pages: Haggis Bard Stuffed.

Poor old Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, must have foreseen exactly what the newspapers were going to say on his death, and none of them disappointed his expectations: every single one reported it under variations on the headline "Hitler Diaries Useful Idiot Dies".

It will have caused great pleasure in Cambridge, no doubt, a place Dacre openly despised while Master of Peterhouse, saying that holding a party there was like "inviting the beau monde to Biggleswade", and, after Oxford, he felt like an unwillingly dispatched colonial governor. His relationship with Cambridge was rather like a minor 18th-century war, fought through attrition, small piratical ventures into neighbouring territories and calculated insults.

In 1983, to his adversaries' incredulous glee, they found that they had been unexpectedly handed a thermonuclear device, trained directly on the Peterhouse musketry. Asked to authenticate a vast cache of Hitler's diaries by his employer, The Sunday Times, Dacre did so without suggesting that tests might be run on the paper (which proved to be post-war), and declared himself convinced by entries like "Don't forget to get Eva tickets for the Olympics" and other absurdities.

He changed his mind fairly quickly, but it was already too late. "Fuck Dacre," Rupert Murdoch is supposed to have said, and ran his initial approval, rather than his quickly-registered second thoughts. In the fall-out, Dacre's lack of ease in reading German, particularly (it was widely said) if it was in that horrid old script, was much commented on, and Cambridge went into ecstasies. The story goes that one of his old sparring partners acquired two dogs shortly afterwards, naming one "Hitler" and the other "Diaries", for the sole pleasure of exercising them near Dacre's house and calling them repeatedly to heel.

Poor sod. You can devote your life to ground-breaking historical studies, on periods from the fall of the Third Reich in The Last Days of Hitler to the politics of the 17th century, all, without exception, elegantly written and solidly researched; you can educate generation after generation of distinguished historians. And still, in the end, it all comes down to something you said in a tizzy, with a hard-nosed journalist on the other end of the phone saying "Come on, we haven't got all day, make your mind up." It seems terribly unfair.

But of course, you don't get the choice about what, if anything, you are going to be remembered for. Philip Larkin gets boiled down to the man who had views about what your mum and dad do to you – a line which, he ruefully said, he confidently expected to live to hear chanted by Girl Guides in the Albert Hall. When Alec Guinness died, his main claim to newspaper distinction seemed to be that he was Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. Nothing at all is remembered of Stephen Milligan, a hard-working and decent MP, except that he died trussed up in fishnet stockings with an orange in his mouth.

And even more apparently distinguished names get remembered for reasons which, to them, would seem absolutely bizarre. Mozart would, surely, be incredulous that The Magic Flute is still being mounted, and most of his masses lying in obscurity. His librettist, Da Ponte, was clear about his claim to fame, but got it completely wrong; his substantial autobiography hardly mentions Mozart at all. Benjamin Haydon was confident that he would be admired for his paintings, and probably hardly considered that it would be his journals and jottings that would make him immortal.

The moral, I suppose, is never put a foot wrong, but that isn't very helpful or realistic advice. The only thing you can do is be thankful that you aren't going to know what people say when you're not around to complain, and in the meantime try to delude yourself. There is a story which is rather appallingly to the point here, however, about an old man, shunned by the Italian village where he lives. Asked to explain, he says "I put up a shelf in the kitchen. Do they call me Luigi the carpenter? I cook my wife dinner on her birthday. Do they call me Luigi the chef? But you have sex with one solitary sheep!"

p.hensher@independent.co.uk