Author(s): Hugh Trevor-Roper (Author), Richard Davenport-Hines
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
Publication Date: 30 Nov. 2012
Edition: Illustrated
Language: English
Print length: 336 pages
ISBN-10: 1848859902
ISBN-13: 9781848859906
Book Description
As a British Intelligence Officer during World War II, Hugh Trevor-Roper was expressly forbidden from keeping a diary due to the sensitive and confidential nature of his work. However, he confided a record of his thoughts in a series of slender notebooks inscribed OHMS (On His Majesty’s Service). The Wartime Journals” reveal the voice and experiences of Trevor-Roper, a war-time ‘backroom boy’ who spent most of the war engaged in highly-confidential intelligence work in England – including breaking the cipher code of the German secret service, the Abwehr. He became an expert in German resistance plots and after the war interrogated many of Hitler’s immediate circle, investigated Hitler’s death in the Berlin bunker and personally retrieved Hitler’s will from its secret hiding place. The posthumous discovery of Trevor-Roper’s secret journals – unknown even to his family and closest confidants – is an exciting archival find and provides an unusual and privileged view of the Allied war effort against Nazi Germany. At the same time they offer an engaging – sometimes mischievous – and reflective study of both the human comedy and personal tragedy of wartime.”
Editorial Reviews
Review
‘A humorous, waspish and intriguing perormance.’ (The Times)
‘This is an old-fashioned publication, but none the worse for that. Its miscellaneous nature makes it an excellent beside book, providing sophisticated entertainment as one slips into sleep. The notebooks have been edited by Richard Davenport-Hines with a meticulousness or perhaps that should be meticulum that would have pleased their author.’ (
Literary Review)
‘This book has been superbly edited by Richard Davenport-Hines, whose notes are models of both pithiness and omniscience…this is an extraordinarily rich record of an unusually rich mind one of the most interesting people in recent English intellectual life, caught at one of the most vital moments in English history.’ (
Standpoint)
Richard Davenport-Hines has ably edited the wartime diaries of Trevor-Roper himself, and they prove vastly more entertaining and instructive than anything the Führer could have written. (
Nigel Jones, The Daily Telegraph)
‘Richard Davenport-Hines… edits [the journals] with a wit and scholarship worthy of his subject…the unique view that the journals do provide… is one of the author himself, and one worth having.’ (
Michael Howard, TLS)
‘…with his own sharp, bright footnotes, by Richard Davenport-Hines,
The Wartime Journals should quite simply join the great diaries…In the way of great diaries, The Wartime Journals call up the absurdity of detail.’ –(Edward Pearce, Tribune)
‘…superlatively entertaining.’ –(
John Banville, Guardian)
…with his own sharp, bright footnotes, by Richard Davenport-Hines, The Wartime Journals should quite simply join the great diaries…In the way of great diaries, The Wartime Journals call up the absurdity of detail. –Edward Pearce, Tribune
About the Author
Hugh Trevor-Roper was perhaps the most brilliant historian of his generation. An expert in the history of early modern Britain and Nazi Germany, he was Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University and latterly Master of Peterhouse College, Cambridge. He received a life peerage in 1979. He was the author of numerous books, including his famous investigation of Hitler’s last days. During World War II, Trevor-Roper served in the Secret Intelligence Service and this book contains his journals written during the war and in its immediate aftermath. Richard Davenport-Hines is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Literature and a past winner of the Wolfson Prize for History. He is the author of many books, including A Night at the Majestic (2006) and The Pursuit of Oblivion (2001). He edited Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Letters from Oxford (2006) and is a regular reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Times, History Today and other publications.
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