DACRE LECTURE 2020:
David Reynolds
The Last Days of Hitler and the Coming of the Cold War
Corpus Christi College Oxford, Friday 15 May, 5.00 p.m.
NEW PUBLICATION FEBRUARY 2020:
HUGH TREVOR-ROPER
THE CHINA JOURNALS
Ideology and Intrigue in the 1960s
edited by Richard Davenport-Hines
published by Bloomsbury
These private journals, made available here for the first time, record Hugh Trevor-Roper’s visit to the People’s Republic of China in the autumn of 1965, shortly before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, and describe the controversial aftermath of his journey on his return to England.
The visit was a catalogue of frustrations, which he relates with the verve and irony of a master narrator who relished the human comedy. His efforts to meet the real life and mind of China, in whose history and politics he had long been interested, were blocked at every turn by the resources of state propaganda and the claustrophobic attention of sullen Party guides. The visit was arranged by the London-based Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, which was ostensibly committed to the impartial interchange of culture and ideas. It proved to be run by a Communist claque whose ruthless methods of control outwitted the well-connected membership.
Back in England, and with help from MI5, he resolved to get to the bottom of the society’s affairs. His investigations provoked a tumultuous public row which Trevor-Roper, no shirker of controversy, zestfully traces in these pages. Through the book, which closes with an account of his visit to Taiwan and South-East Asia in 1967, there run the wisdom of historical perspective that he brought to contemporary events and his lifelong commitment to the defence of liberal values and practices against their ideological adversaries.
TWO BOOKS NEWLY IN PAPERBACK MAY 2020
HUGH TREVOR-ROPER. THE HISTORIAN
edited by Blair Worden
with essays by Rory Allan, John Banville, Sir John Elliott, Mark Greengrass, E.D.R. Harrison, Colin Kidd, Sir Noel Malcolm, Simon Malloch, Richard Overy, John Robertson, Gina Thomas, Blair Worden, Brian Young
HUGH TREVOR-ROPER
THE SECRET WORLD
Behind the Curtain of British Intelligence in World War II and the Cold War
edited by E.D.R. Harrison
(both published by Bloomsbury)
Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, who became a life peer as Lord Dacre of Glanton in 1989, was born on 15 January 1914. The son of a country doctor in Northumberland, he was educated at Charterhouse and then at Christ Church, Oxford, where he read first for a degree in Classics and then for one in History. He became a Research Fellow of Merton College Oxford in 1938. During the second World War he was an intelligence officer. In 1946 he returned to Christ Church as a Student, where he remained until 1957 when he became Regius Professor of Modern History, a post he held until 1980. From 1980 to 1987 he was Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He died on 26 January 2003.
His books were The Last Days of Hitler (1947); Historical Essays (1957);Religion, The Reformation and Social Change (1967); The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1970); Princes and Artists (1976); A Hidden Life (1976; also published as The Hermit of Peking);Renaissance Essays (1985); Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans (1987); From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution (1987).
Eight books have appeared posthumously: Letters from Oxford (2006); Europe’s Physician. The Various Life of Sir Theodore Mayerne (2006); The Invention of Scotland (2008); History and the Enlightenment (2010); The Wartime Journals (2012); The Secret World. Behind the Curtain of British Intellignce in World War II and the Cold War (2014); One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper (2014); The China Journals. Ideology and Intrigue in the 1960s (2020).