Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton (January 15, 1914 - January 26, 2003) was a notable historian of early modern Britain and Nazi Germany, who became infamous for authenticating the Hitler Diaries, which were later proved to be a hoax.

He was born in Glanton , Northumberland, and educated at Charterhouse and at Christ Church, Oxford. In 1957 he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, a post he held until 1980; subsequently he became Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge. Having achieved his first major success with The Last Days of Hitler (1947), he consolidated his reputation as an authority on the Third Reich with books such as Hitler's Table Talk (1953) and The Goebbels Diaries (1978), although his area of specialty was early modern Britain, especially the period around the English Civil War.

As a historian of early modern Britain, Trevor-Roper was most famous for his disputes with fellow historians such as Lawrence Stone and Christopher Hill, whose materialist explanations of the English Civil War he enthusiastically attacked. His attacks on the philosophies of history advanced by the historians Arnold Toynbee and Edward Hallet Carr, and on his colleague A.J.P. Taylor's account of the origins of World War II, also won Trevor-Roper wide recognition. He frequently published articles and book reviews in newspapers and magazines directed to the general public (some of which were collected in his book Historical Essays in 1957), and appeared occasionally on television.

On October 4, 1954, Trevor-Roper married Lady Alexandra Henrietta Louisa Howard-Johnston (March 9, 1907 - August 15, 1997), eldest daughter of Field Marshal the Earl Haig by his wife, the former Hon. Dorothy Maud Vivian. Lady Alexandra was a goddaughter of Queen Alexandra, and had previously been married to Rear-Admiral Clarence Dinsmore Howard-Johnston , by whom she had had three children. His brother, Patrick Trevor-Roper, was a leading eye surgeon and prominent gay rights campaigner.

He was awarded a life peerage in 1979, and chose the title "Baron Dacre of Glanton".

The nadir of Dacre's career came in 1983, when, along with others, he authenticated the so-called Hitler Diaries, which later forensic examination proved to be a fake. This raised questions in the public mind not only about his perspicacity as a historian but also about his personal integrity, because The Sunday Times, a newspaper to which he regularly contributed book reviews and in whose parent company he held a financial interest, had already paid a considerable sum for the right to serialise the diaries. Dacre denied any dishonest motivation, insisting that he, like others, had made a genuine mistake. Despite the shadow that this incident cast over his later career, he continued writing (producing Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans in 1987, for example), and his work continued to be well received.

Dacre died of cancer in a hospice in Oxford, aged 89.

Work

• Archbishop Laud, 1573-1645, 1940.
• The Last Days of Hitler, 1947.
• Historical Essays, 1957.
• "The General Crisis of the Seventheenth Century" pages 31-64 from Past and Present, Volume 16, 1959.
• The Rise of Christian Europe, 1965.
• Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change, and Other Essays, 1967.
• The Age of Expansion, Europe and the World, 1559-1600, edited by Hugh Trevor-Roper, 1968.
• Queen Elizabeth's First Historian: William Camden and the Beginning of English "Civil History", 1971.
• A Hidden Life: The Enigma of Sir Edmund Backhouse, 1976.
• Princes and Artists: Patronage and Ideology at Four Habsburg Courts, 1517-1633, 1976.
• History and Imagination: A Valedictory Lecture Delivered before the University of of Oxford on 20 May 1980, 1980.
• Renaissance Essays, 1985.
• Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeeth Century Essays, 1987.
• From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution, 1992.

Reference

• Lloyd-Jones, Hugh; Pearl, Valerie & Worden, Blair (editors) History and Imagination: Essays in Honor of H.R Trevor-Roper, London: Duckworth, 1981.
• Saleh, Zaki Trevor-Roper's Critique of Arnold Toynbee: A Symptom of Intellectual Chaos, Baghdad: Al-Ma'eref Press, 1958.

External links

• Obituary from BBC News website
• Obituary from GuardianUnlimited (there are several discrepancies between these sources)
• Obituary posted on newsgroups by Michael Rhodes (probably more trustworthy than the pages above, actually)