Volume 35, Number 6 · April 14, 1988
Charmed Circles
By Robert M. Adams
Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth Century Essays
by Hugh Trevor-Roper
University of Chicago Press, 317 pp., $27.50
Archbishop William Laud
by Charles Carlton
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 272 pp., $65.00
Clarendon and His Friends
by Richard Ollard
Atheneum, 367 pp., $22.50
Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640
by Nicholas Tyacke
Oxford University Press, 305 pp., $57.00
Hugh Trevor-Roper is one of the few persons to whom that most hackneyed of academic adjectives, distinguished, properly applies. The sweep of his learning is magisterial; his judgments are broadly based and forcefully argued; and he is, unlike many of his more narrowly specialized colleagues, invariably a pleasure to read. The Last Days of Hitler was undoubtedly his most widely read book, but he has written as well on the psychology of treason, on art plunder and patronage, about an eccentric English fantasist in China, on medieval history, and repeatedly on the political and religious history of the English seventeenth century. Picking up one of his books is like settling into a Rolls-Royce—one experiences the mighty motor purring up front, the smooth ride—the pleasurable sense of intellectual transportation deluxe. As the variety of his interests attests, he has written more often short, concentrated studies than long narrations; but he brings to even modest topics the wide perspective and common sense that he is fond of tracing back to Erasmus.
Review, 5010 words
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