An Honourable Englishman: The Life of Hugh Trevor-Roper by Adam Sisman

Author:Adam Sisman [Sisman, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780679604730
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-12-05T23:00:00+00:00

Hugh’s Historical Essays was published by Macmillan in the autumn of 1957.* Of the forty-two “essays” in the book, all had been previously published, most of them as book reviews in the New Statesman. In his foreword, Hugh posed the question whether it was legitimate to reprint historical essays which had already been published; and answered that it was, “if they receive an underlying unity from the philosophy of the writer.” Reviewing the book in The Sunday Times, Cyril Connolly observed that “Professor Trevor-Roper … leaves us to guess what that philosophy is,” and cynically suggested that it was a philosophy common to all writers of reviews: “if they can make a book of them, they will.” Harold Nicolson, in The Observer, questioned the use of the term “essays” to refer to a volume composed largely of short book reviews. Like Connolly, he found much to enjoy in the book, but he deplored the “absence of even average human compassion.” He hoped that Hugh would acquire more tolerance as he matured. “Among the strings of his lute there is a wire of hate which is apt to twang suddenly with the rasp of a banjo.”43

In fact, Hugh’s foreword did advance a philosophy, a bold assertion of the principles he had outlined to Masterman in his letter setting out the qualities desirable in a Regius Professor:

Today most professional historians “specialise.” They choose a period, sometimes a very brief period, and within that period they strive, in desperate competition with ever-expanding evidence, to know all the facts. Thus armed, they can comfortably shoot down any amateurs who blunder or rivals who stray into their heavily fortified field; and, of course, knowing the strength of modern defensive weapons, they themselves keep prudently within their frontiers. Theirs is a static world. They have a self-contained economy, a Maginot Line and large reserves which they seldom use; but they have no philosophy. For historical philosophy is incompatible with such narrow frontiers. It must apply to humanity in any period. To test it, a historian must dare to travel abroad, even in hostile country; to express it he must be ready to write essays on subjects on which he may be ill-equipped to write books.

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