Portrait of a singular man

The posthumous publication of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s wartime diaries continues the restoration of his reputation, says Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Nothing is more elusive than reputation. A writer’s standing goes up and down like a share price, during his life and after, for no obvious or objective reason, as D. J. Taylor observed in a recent perceptive essay in the TLS on the fall from favour of Angus Wilson, although I still read his novels if no one else does. Then again, others recover. Terence Rattigan’s stock was very low when he died in 1977, long sneered at as the epitome of middlebrow, middle-class West End

theatre. But lo, there has been a startling Rattigan renaissance. The admirable Michael Billington of the Guardian (whose incorrigible left-wing prejudice doesn’t cloud his literary judgment) led the way in recognising Rattigan’s intense, repressed emotional depth, all culminating in this, his centennial year, with more revivals, and Terence Davies’s movie of The Deep Blue Sea.

Likewise, when Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, or Lord Dacre of Glanton as he capriciously called himself when elevated to the peerage under Mrs Thatcher, died nine years ago in sad old age, his stock had fallen a long way from the days when he was Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford and something like a national figure. It had seemingly never recovered from the crash 20 years earlier, his disastrous and humiliating brainstorm over the forged ‘Hitler diaries’, and some of the first reviewers of Adam Sisman’s excellent biography in the summer of last year said that this fiasco was all that Trevor-Roper would be remembered for.

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Just how untrue that was would be shown by subsequent and ever more appreciative reviews, by Neal Ascherson, Noel Malcolm and Anthony Grafton, writers quite diverse except for their love of history — and their admiration for Trevor-Roper.