Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper

The distinguished Oxford professor of modern history presents evidence that Chinese scholar and author Sir Edmund Backhouse, long thought to have lived as a virtual hermit in Peking, was in reality a forger, trickster, and eccentric.

The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse

Hermit of Peking

This book argues that while Anglo-Saxon culture has given rise to virtually no myths at all, myth has played a central role in the historical development of Scottish identity. Hugh Trevor-Roper explores three myths across 400 years of Scottish history: the political myth of the “ancient constitution” of Scotland; the literary myth, including Walter Scott as well as Ossian and ancient poetry; and the sartorial myth of tartan and the kilt, invented—ironically, by Englishmen—in quite modern times. Trevor-Roper reveals myth as an often deliberate cultural construction used to enshrine a people’s identity. While his treatment of Scottish myth is highly critical, indeed debunking, he shows how the ritualization and domestication of Scotland’s myths as local color diverted the Scottish intelligentsia from the path that led German intellectuals to a dangerous myth of racial supremacy. This compelling manuscript was left unpublished on Trevor-Roper’s death in 2003 and is now made available for the first time. Written with characteristic elegance, lucidity, and wit, and containing defiant and challenging opinions, it will absorb and provoke Scottish readers while intriguing many others. “I believe that the whole history of Scotland has been coloured by myth; and that myth, in Scotland, is never driven out by reality, or by reason, but lingers on until another myth has been discovered, or elaborated, to replace it.”–Hugh Trevor-Roper

Myth and History

The Invention of Scotland

Joseph Goebbels

Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, second in command to Adolf Hitler.

The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels

Final Entries, 1945

The John Coffin Memorial Lecture Delivered Before the University of London on 17 February 1969

The Romantic Movement and the Study of History

The European Witch-craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, and Other Essays

Om hekser og heksejakt

First published in 1976 under title: A hidden life. Includes bibliographical references and index.

A brilliant, unknown work by the great historian Hugh Trevor-Roper Among the papers of Hugh Trevor-Roper, who died in 2003, was a manuscript to which he had repeatedly turned for more than thirty years, but never published. Attracted by the diverse life and vivid personality of Sir Theodore de Mayerne (1573-1655), the most famous physician in Europe of his time, Trevor-Roper pursued him across national and intellectual frontiers to uncover the details of his extraordinary life. Exploring an array of English and European sources, Trevor-Roper reveals the story of the pioneering Swiss Huguenot doctor who mixed medicine with diplomacy, with political intrigue, with secret intelligence, and with artistic interests at the courts first of Henry IV of France and then of James I and Charles I of England. A true "renaissance man," Mayerne's interests were broad, and due to considerable conspiratorial talent, he became a participant in bluff and intrigue at the highest levels. The most ambitious and perhaps the most original of all Trevor-Roper's books, written in his luminous prose, this is a major work of political and intellectual history that presents a whole period in a fresh and vivid light.

The Various Life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne

Europe's Physician

Historical Essays

The Civil War, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution in England laid the institutional and intellectual foundations of the modern understanding of liberty, of which we are heirs and beneficiaries. The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century uncovers new pathways to understanding this seminal time. Neither Catholic nor Protestant emerges unscathed from the examination to which Trevor-Roper subjects the era in which, from political and religious causes, the identification and extirpation of witches was a central event. Trevor-Roper points out that "In England the most active phase of witch-hunting coincided with times of Puritan pressure -- the reign of Queen Elizabeth and the period of the civil wars -- and some very fanciful theories have been built on this coincidence. But... the persecution of witches in England was trivial compared with the experience of the Continent and of Scotland. Therefore... [one must examine] the craze as a whole, throughout Europe, and [seek] to relate its rise, frequency, and decline to the general intellectual and social movements of the time...".

Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change

The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century

History and Imagination

In September 1945 the circumstances surrounding Hitler's death were dark and mysterious. Hugh Trevor-Roper, an intelligence officer, was given the task of uncovering the last few weeks of Hitler's life. His brilliant piece of detective work proved finally that Hitler had killed himself and also tells the story of the last days of the Thousand Year Reich in the Berlin Bunker.

The Last Days of Hitler

Richard Davenport-Hines

Adam Sisman

A carefully chosen selection from the correspondence of Hugh Trevor-Roper, one of the most gifted and famous historians of his generation and one of the finest letter-writers of the 20th century.

One Hundred Letters From Hugh Trevor-Roper

"The relationship between artists and their patrons has always been a complex and fascinating one. In the case of the Habsburg rules of the sixteenth and seventh centuries, this is especially true, not only because those rulers are themselves of intrinsic interest, but because the artists whom they encouraged or employed - Durer, Titian, El Grego, Rubens - were among the greatest of all times. In Princes and Artists Professor Trevor-Roper explores the relationship between art and patronage through the careers of the Emperor Charles V (1500-58), his son Philip II of Spain (1527-98), the Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) and 'the arch-dukes" - Albert and Isabella - who ruled the southern Netherlands from 1598 to 1633. In the context of their personal lives, their several courts, their political activities, and the ideological conflicts of the era, art played an immensely important role - partly as propaganda, partly for the sheer aesthetic pleasure it gave. The author argues that the distinctive characteristics of patronage in this period, which spanned the transition from the High Renaissance to the Baroque in art, from the Reformation to the Counter-Reformation in ideology, are to be explained by the 'world picture' of the age: "Art symbolised a whole view of life, of which politics were a part, and which the court had a duty to advertise and sustain." -- Book jacket.

Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper

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