Hugh Trevor-Roper: the Biography

From The Telegraph:

Trev At a house party at Boughton in the early Fifties, the publisher Jamie Hamilton and his wife encountered Hugh Trevor-Roper. “We found ourselves wondering if one so young and gifted ought to spend quite so much time hating people,” Hamilton reported back to the art historian Bernard Berenson. “He has hardly a charitable word for anyone, and seems to relish the discomfiture even of those he is supposed to like. A strange mixture, and rather a frightening one.”

But also an irresistible one. We are in the midst of a Trevor-Roper revival. Since his death in 2003, much of Lord Dacre’s arsenal of unfinished essays and biographies has finally come into print – alongside his stunning correspondence with Berenson, Letters from Oxford, edited by Richard Davenport-Hines. His was a compelling 20th-century life, complete with an enviable array of walk-on parts from Katharine Hepburn and Anthony Blunt to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, President of Pakistan. But what Adam Sisman’s new biography, for all its scholarship and detail, fails to provide is the convincing answer for Trevor-Roper’s claims as one of our greatest historians.

More here.