Hugh Trevor-Roper: the spy as historian, the historian as spy

Shortly after the war began in September 1939, the branch of the intelligence services called MI8, or the Radio Security Service, recruited H.R. Trevor-Roper (as his name would appear the following year on the title page of his first book, his acerbic and somewhat anti-clerical life of Archbishop Laud). He was a young Oxford don, or would-be don, a research fellow of Merton. His academic career was now interrupted for six years: nominally commissioned in the Life Guards, he plunged deep into the murky world of secret intelligence.

Before that, and before he turned to Modern History, Trevor-Roper had been a brilliant classicist, winning a string of university prizes. He was repelled by what he found the sterility into which classical textual criticism had descended, but it was all the same the brilliant analytical mind he had shown in that field which was now turned to cryptography — other classicists, as well as mathematicians, chess players and musicians displayed a similar aptitude — and to interpreting raw intelligence.