Hugh Trevor-Roper might have been a great historian, taking his place in the Pantheon alongside the great historians of the past, from Xenophon to Macaulay. But the mark of a great historian is that he writes great books, on the subject that he has made his own. By this exacting standard [Trevor-Roper] failed.
Adam Sisman’s assessment, in his compelling new biography (Hugh Trevor-Roper, Weidenfeld, £25), though I dissent from it, is a measured one. It is balanced by recognition of the extent of Trevor-Roper’s achievements. Many of Sisman’s reviewers have been less measured. In the New Statesman, Anthony Howard, after pronouncing ‘the real failure’ of Trevor-Roper’s career to have lain ‘in his inability to produce the great book that was expected of him’, describes him as ‘a superbly gifted journalist and reviewer’ who ‘left no lasting imprint as a historian’. In the Independent, Brendan Simms attributes Trevor-Roper’s ‘scholarly constipation’, and his ‘failure to publish a large-scale work’, partly to his wife’s expensive tastes, which ‘drove him to take on ever more journalistic commissions to pay the bills’, but principally to the waste of his time on ‘academic politics and personal vendettas’. In the same queue, the Economist’s anonymous reviewer writes of ‘tragic failure’, for Trevor-Roper ‘never wrote the great work that everybody expected of him’.
‘Everybody’ cannot include Trevor-Roper himself. He never saw himself as a Macaulay, let alone a Xenophon. He did record, in a youthful notebook, ‘my fond ambition to write a book that someone, some day, will mention in the same breath as Gibbon’, but it was the voice, not the scale, of The Decline and Fall that he emulated. The ambition was soon achieved, for The Last Days of Hitler has often been compared to Gibbon. People who complain that Trevor-Roper never wrote a great book will also tell you that The Last Days is a classic. A ‘great’ book, it seems, must be a long one.
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