H. R. Trevor-Roper

"When they met in 1947 Hugh Trevor-Roper, a young historian at Christ Church, Oxford, was 33. Bernard Berenson, a world-famous art critic, was 82, frail but still intensely curious about the world. Trevor-Roper promised to write to him and his letters continued until Berenson's death in 1959." "A mix of social comedy, high-class gossip, sharp intellectual judgements and brilliant travel description, these are wonderfully readable letters. As the friendship with Berenson matures, they grow longer and more discursive. Oxford intrigue and elections are a particular delight, so that the election of a Warden of All Souls or a Professor of Poetry becomes an epic battle between the Party of Light and the Party of Darkness." "The letters range widely: postwar Europe, ex-Nazis and collaborators, the Cold War, Suez, history and historians, journalism, books, publishing and travel. He has a memorable journey on a pilgrims' bus in Persia, goes behind the Iron Curtain to meet Communist dignitaries and speeds in his glamorous grey Bentley to visit duchesses in the Scottish borders. Evelyn Waugh, Isaiah Berlin, A.L. Rowse, Anthony Eden, Gerald Brenan, A.J.P. Taylor, Arnold Toynbee, Dimitri Shostakovitch, C.S. Lewis and Harold Macmillan are among those who figure in these letters."--Jacket.

A carefully chosen selection from the correspondence of Hugh Trevor-Roper, one of the most gifted and famous historians of his generation and one of the finest letter-writers of the 20th century.

First published in 1976 under title: A hidden life. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Here is history at its Magnificent and Panormic best by a Brilliant schollar known as " The first modern historian." "I set out upon Gibbion's Decline and fall of the roman empire [and] was immediately dominated by both the story and the style. I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end".

This collection is the third in a series which gathers the best historical essays of Hugh Trevor-Roper, considered by many the unequalled master of the form. The pieces here range from an account of the Jesuit Matteo Ricci's mission in China in the sixteenth century to a discussion of the Anglo-Scottish Union. They include essays on medicine at the early Stuart Court, on the plunder of artistic treasures in Europe during the wars of the seventeenth century, on the plans of Hugo Grotius to create a new universal church on an Anglican base, on the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and religious toleration thereafter. There are also biographical studies of Archbishop Laud, Matthew Wren, the Earl of Clarendon, and Prince Rupert. As Noel argument wrote in Our Age, Hugh Trevor-Roper has "perfected the historical essay as the most beguiling form of enlightening readers about the past. He is the most eloquent, sophisticated and assured historian of Our Age, and has never written an inelegant sentence or produced an incoherent arguement."

"The relationship between artists and their patrons has always been a complex and fascinating one. In the case of the Habsburg rules of the sixteenth and seventh centuries, this is especially true, not only because those rulers are themselves of intrinsic interest, but because the artists whom they encouraged or employed – Durer, Titian, El Grego, Rubens – were among the greatest of all times. In Princes and Artists Professor Trevor-Roper explores the relationship between art and patronage through the careers of the Emperor Charles V (1500-58), his son Philip II of Spain (1527-98), the Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) and ‘the arch-dukes” – Albert and Isabella – who ruled the southern Netherlands from 1598 to 1633. In the context of their personal lives, their several courts, their political activities, and the ideological conflicts of the era, art played an immensely important role - partly as propaganda, partly for the sheer aesthetic pleasure it gave. The author argues that the distinctive characteristics of patronage in this period, which spanned the transition from the High Renaissance to the Baroque in art, from the Reformation to the Counter-Reformation in ideology, are to be explained by the ‘world picture’ of the age: "Art symbolised a whole view of life, of which politics were a part, and which the court had a duty to advertise and sustain.” -- Book jacket.

The fantasy of Scotland's history: In The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History, the late historian tells how, in futile competition, with its mighty English neighbour, Scotland's official story, it's history, and even national literature (they claimed Ossian was an ancient Scottish Homer for example) is based on fiction: neither the Kilt (the 'Kjalta' was in fact worn by the Germanic Vikings, cousins of the English, and not Celts) - or the Bagpipes are Scottish. Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote: In Scotland, it seems to me, myth has played a far more important part in history than it has in England. Indeed... the whole history of Scotland has been coloured by myth; and that myth, in Scotland, is never driven out by reality, or by reason, but lingers on until another myth has been discovered, or elaborated, to replace it. ...Three consecutive myths have successively filled the 400 years of Scottish history from the 16th century to the 20th. The political myth, the literary myth and the sartorial myth, which is with us still. These myths, though they may explode on contact with the evidence, are nevertheless historically important. It became a part of the national honour to maintain them - at least until a new myth should be imported to drive them out.

Late in 1945, Trevor-Roper was appointed by British Intelligence in Germany to investigate conflicting evidence surrounding Hitler’s final days and to produce a definitive report on his death. The author, who had access to American counterintelligence files and to German prisoners, focuses on the last ten days of Hitler’s life, April 20-29, 1945, in the underground bunker in Berlin—a bizarre and gripping episode punctuated by power play and competition among Hitler’s potential successors. (Source: [University of Chicago Press](