Wartime Journals

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.

'... a marvelous book, packed with philosophical speculation, historical sketches, ravishingly beautiful nature writing, jokes, squibs, insults, and affirmations. The editing is impeccable and in its way, suitably eccentric and amusing.' New York Review of Books; '...the surviving Wartime Journals, now excellently edited by Richard Davenport-Hines, provide us with a fascinating insight into Trevor-Roper himself and the war as well - Often the style of the journals is so highly developed that one has to remind oneself that the author was not even 30 when he put down his thoughts and experiences.' Brendan Simms, The Wall Street Journal; '[A] humorous, waspish and intriguing performance.' Allan Mallinson, The Times; '...superlatively entertaining.' John Banville 'Richard Davenport-Hines has ably edited the wartime diaries of Trevor-Roper himself, and they prove vastly more entertaining and instructive than anything the Fuhrer could have written.' Nigel Jones, The Daily Telegraph; '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.' Adam Sisman, Literary Review; 'Riveting... the most intimate self-portrait we have of this singular man.' Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Spectator; '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; 'The book has been superbly edited by Richard Davenport-Hines, whose notes are models of both pithiness and omniscience [...] For all the occasional touches of juvenile aspiration and self-importance, 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.' Noel Malcolm, Standpoint; 'the publishers IB Tauris did a great service to book-lovers by issuing Hugh Trevor-Roper's Wartime Journals in this handsome paperback earlier this year... These journals are not diaries. Instead, they're a sequence of highly-polished entries...They contain some extraordinary pen-portraits... One of the reasons this book is such a delight is that you're in the hands of a true scholar and literary sophisticate in the person of the editor, Richard Davenport-Hines... His professionalism and sheer stylishness are everywhere evident... His notes are incredibly thorough, and his Introduction is the best thing in the book.' Bradley Winterton, Taipei Times;

Hugh Trevor-Roper was perhaps the most brilliant historian of his generation. An expert in the history of both early modern Britain and Nazi Germany, he was Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University and latterly Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He received a life peerage in 1979. During the Second World War, Trevor-Roper served in the Secret Intelligence Service and this book contains his journals written during the war and in its immediate aftermath, including the period in Berlin during which he undertook detailed enquiries into the circumstances of Hitler's death under commission from the SIS. It was these investigations that formed the basis for one of his best-known books: The Last Days of Hitler. 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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