All this — the battling with l’infâme, the canvassing of rural deans to vote this way, or that, the dining with duchesses, and, of course, the incessant correspondence —took up time which soberer spirits said should have been devoted to composing major historical works. Although he published any number of reviews, essays and pasquinades, although he travelled everywhere and met everyone, was he not ultimately vulnerable to the same charge as those other Oxford historians he derided for failing to put something substantial together? Would he not have done better to settle down in real scholarly seclusion rather than fritter his time and his reputation in authenticating forged Hitler Diaries for Rupert Murdoch or, as Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, in his late sixties, trying to quell a bunch of dons who made his old Oxford enemies look positively sweet-natured and ingenuous? Whatever became of his major work on the rule of Robert Cecil? Or of his vast book on the Puritan Revolution (he wrote 600 pages, tore them up, rewrote them and then what)? Or of his life of Cromwell in three volumes?
Well, we miss them all, but I don’t think we miss their effects, because, by and large, the causes for which he battled with such ferocious glee have come out on top, in the Cold War no less than in the English Civil War. In politics as in historiography, the Marxists and the marxisants have been routed. It is easy to forget how their premises and arguments were once taken for granted and how quirky and perverse seemed those who spoke out against them. But then looking quirky and perverse was something Hugh Trevor-Roper never minded.
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