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.