Concept

Hugh Trevor-Roper

Overview

Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton (15 January 1914 – 26 January 2003) was an English historian. He was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford.

Trevor-Roper was a polemicist and essayist on a range of historical topics, but particularly England in the 16th and 17th centuries and Nazi Germany. According to John Philipps Kenyon, "some of [Trevor-Roper's] short essays have affected the way we think about the past more than other men's books". Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman wrote that "The bulk of his publications is formidable ... Some of his essays are of Victorian length. All of them reduce large subjects to their essence. Many of them ... have lastingly transformed their fields." Conversely, Sisman wrote: "the mark of a great historian is that he writes great books, on the subject which he has made his own. By this exacting standard Hugh failed."

In 1945, British intelligence tasked Trevor-Roper with ascertaining the facts about Adolf Hitler's death. From interviews with a range of witnesses and study of surviving documents, he concluded in The Last Days of Hitler (1947) that Hitler was dead and had not escaped Berlin.

In 1983, Trevor-Roper's reputation was "severely damaged" when he authenticated the Hitler Diaries shortly before they were shown to be forgeries.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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It was by the help of such images and precedents that man eventually kept in his memory five or six "I will nots" with regard to which he had already given his _promise_, so as to be able to enjoy the advantages of society--and verily with the help of this kind of memory man eventually attained "reason"! Alas! reason, seriousness, mastery over the emotions, all these gloomy, dismal things which are called…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals The Complete Works, Volume Thirteen, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy.
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For if, as Gibbon says, nothing but time--though a long time--is needed for a world to perish, so nothing but time--though still more time--is needed for a false idea to be destroyed in Germany, the "Land of Little-by-little." In any event, there are perhaps a hundred men more now than there were a century ago who know what poetry is: perhaps in another century there will be a hundred more who have learned in the…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thoughts Out of Season, Part II
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Not content with telling the unvarnished tale of the great acts which have been wrought by the heroes of the world's history, and with acknowledging that their inward being corresponds with the import of their acts, the pragmatic historian fancies himself justified and even obliged to trace the supposed secret motives that lie behind the open facts of the record. The historian, in that case, is supposed to write…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
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