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).  

Seven 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).