The day I had to pour soup over a fire in Hugh Trevor-Roper’s kitchen

Hugh Trevor-Roper long refused to write his memoirs. Eventually, the firm of Weidenfeld persuaded him, if he was not going to write them, to speak them. The recipient of his reminiscences was to be a tape recorder and I.

He agreed to talk to me because – I speculate – I knew him, but not too well. Also, I was not an academic and would therefore not know too much about the donnish politics that consumed him almost as much as any other kind of politics. Furthermore, I made it obvious that I idolised him. This idolising began long before I ever met him, with The Last Days of Hitler and the first volume of essays. I did not much follow him into the 17th century, officially his speciality; perhaps another reason why, from his point of view, I was a suitable interlocutor.

Moreover, he liked the company of journalists and he liked journalism, no matter how often he deplored both. He was himself a journalist. I do not just mean a practitioner of the higher journalism of which many of his essays were originally a part. I suspected in him a journalist by nature. He would have made an excellent gossip columnist in the days when the broadsheets gossiped about the world of which he was a part.

‘I enjoy conversation more than I enjoy writing,’ I find him saying on one tape.

FJ: ‘Gossip?’

HT-R: ‘Gossip, as you say, yes.’

FJ: ‘Academic gossip above all?’

HT-R: ‘No, academic gossip can be rather boring.’

FJ: ‘Political gossip? Who’s up and who’s down at Westminster?’

HT-R: ‘Social gossip. I like a certain intellectual flavour to it, though.’

Every few weeks for a year or so I made the journey by car or train to Didcot with my tape recorder.