Volume 54, Number 6 · April 12, 2007
A Highly Paradoxical Historian
By Keith Thomas
Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson
edited by Richard Davenport-Hines
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 326 pp., £20.00
Europe's Physician: The Various Life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne
by Hugh Trevor-Roper
Yale University Press, 438 pp., $35.00
Hugh Trevor-Roper, who died in 2003, was almost certainly the most gifted of the remarkable generation of British historians who did their best work in the decades after World War II. Yet whereas A.J.P. Taylor, J.H. Plumb, Christopher Hill, R.W. Southern, Alan Bullock, Eric Hobsbawm, Lawrence Stone, Asa Briggs, G.R. Elton, Michael Howard, and E.P. Thompson all went on to publish substantial works worthy of their talents, the general consensus is that Trevor-Roper never entirely fulfilled himself. He was a brilliant essayist and formidable in polemic, with a prose style of unequaled verve, color, and precision. But he never published the magnum opus which his admirers so eagerly awaited.
Review, 4951 words
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