In his day, Hugh Trevor-Roper inspired awe. He was Regius Professor of History at Oxford for almost twenty years and afterwards head of a Cambridge college, but these positions did not even take into account the fact that he kept a horse and rode to hounds, had a contract to write for The Sunday Times, was a prolific broadcaster and reviewer, had an insider’s knowledge of the Intelligence Service in wartime, wrote The Last Days of Hitler (a masterpiece of journalism that has stood the test of time), attended the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann, was a star performer at the Congress of Cultural Freedom, and crossed swords with those who might have been his equal from Arnold Toynbee to Evelyn Waugh. I remember him striding about the Oxford cloisters looking like a young man in search of trouble, and also remember one of his typical put-downs: “Professor Denys Hay has the intellect of a mouse.”

Ah, said his detractors, but he’s supposed to be writing the definitive history of the English civil war in three volumes—where is it? Research involves patient accumulation of facts, and Trevor-Roper was too distracted by the pursuit of ideas to submit to the humdrum grind. Early in his career, he had fallen under the spell of Logan Pearsall Smith and Bernard Berenson, two serious aesthetes of the older generation. Under their influence, he came to understand history as a branch of literature rather than an academic discipline, and the projected three-volume blockbuster instead dissipated into a number of imaginative essays.

In a joint introduction to One Hundred Letters, the editors Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman declare that they were able to choose from thousands of pieces of Trevor-Roper’s correspondence. It is possible that they have given way to parti pris, and a different selection could have revealed a different man. As it is, they have portrayed a public intellectual with considered opinions about everything, but one whose clear desire for affection and friendship helps to temper the otherwise awe-inspiring image. The manner, the Bloomsbury intonation, was easily mistaken for superiority that in reality he did not always feel. In the course of courting his wife, Lady Alexandra Howard-Johnston, Trevor-Roper pleaded that he had “terrible, almost physical difficulty in expressing emotion,” going on to say: “I give my heart to you—rather a complicated object, you may say, like a sea-urchin.” He devoted time and care to the three children from his wife’s previous unhappy marriage to Rear-Admiral Clarence Howard-Johnston, particularly her son James. At first a schoolboy frightened of his stepfather, James became Trevor-Roper’s traveling companion and willing pupil, in the end becoming himself a successful academic.

Rumors used to circulate about Trevor-Roper’s combat in the habitual trench-warfare of the university, whether with the academics Maurice Bowra and Lawrence Stone at Oxford or Maurice Cowling at Cambridge. A. L. Rowse saw him as a rival historian, and in a private letter asked, “Why are you so nasty to people?” Trevor-Roper had the last laugh by publishing in The Spectator a portrait of Rowse in the style of the seventeenth-century gossipmonger John Aubrey. Christopher Hill, Master of Balliol, was an unrepentant Stalinist whose writings, Trevor-Roper says, could not be trusted, but he “can’t help liking the old wretch.” The leftist politics of Moses Finley, classical historian, became an issue when Finley was being considered for an Oxford appointment. For Trevor-Roper, fellow travelers—“apolitical sillies” in his wording—could pass muster if they were good enough, but Communist party members, however talented, were not to be employed: “This is a view I am prepared to defend, and which I am not prepared to change.” Two set-piece demolitions take apart Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s scientific adviser, and Lord Robbins, chairman of the governors of the London School of Economics. Their fault lay in being self-acclaimed Conservatives who did not live up to conservative values.

Fluent and pitch-perfect, Trevor-Roper’s handling of English is an aesthetic peak. Language, he tells one of his correspondents, “is to me something beautiful which deserves to be treated well: it is also a moral question.” With a biblical echo, he ordains Ten Commandments to codify this beautification, which boil down to clarity, simplicity, and what he summarizes as “the rules of right reason.” The range and aptitude of his literary references suggest that even as Trevor-Roper entertained his friends at least some part of his mind was set on future publication. He was doing a turn, then, but it came naturally. A classicist at the outset of his career, he had memorized a huge amount of Latin and Greek poetry; this allows him to deploy obscure adjectives like sotadean and phaeacian with no sense of strain. He seems to know Shakespeare by heart, and in the footnotes the editors heroically identify long-forgotten German professors and seventeenth-century French divines.

Had that been all, Trevor-Roper would have been remembered simply as a proud torchbearer of traditional high civilization. But he had also recorded the fate of Hitler, and from the grave Hitler came to settle his fate. In 1983, diaries purporting to be Hitler’s came onto the market. Rupert Murdoch bought them for serialization in his newspapers and retained Trevor-Roper to authenticate them. But the diaries were fakes, and not very good fakes at that. Writing to Frank Giles, the editor of The Sunday Times, Trevor-Roper explains the pressures that made him fall into the trap and commit the paper to a hoax. He expresses regret but no self-pity as everywhere all traces of the public’s previous awe dissolve into mockery. This book is a step towards redressing his damaged reputation.