| Hugh Trevor-roper |
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LIFE He was born in Glanton , Northumberland , and educated at Charterhouse and at Christ Church, Oxford in the Classics . During World War Two , Trevor-Roper served as a Military Intelligence officer. In 1945 , he was ordered by the British government to investigate the circumstances of Adolf Hitler 's death and to rebut the claims of the Soviet government that Hitler was still alive and living somewhere in the West. The ensuing investigation resulted in Trevor-Roper's most famous book, 1947 's ''The Last Days of Hitler''. In 1957 he was appointed Regius Professor Of Modern History at the University Of Oxford , a post he held until 1980 ; subsequently he became Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge . Having achieved his first major success with ''The Last Days of Hitler'' ( 1947 ), he consolidated his reputation as an authority on the Third Reich with books such as ''Hitler's Table Talk'' ( 1953 ) and ''The Goebbels Diaries'' ( 1978 ), although his area of specialty was early modern Britain, especially the period around the English Civil War . As a historian of early modern Britain, Trevor-Roper was most famous for his disputes with fellow historians such as Lawrence Stone and Christopher Hill , whose materialist explanations of the English Civil War he enthusiastically attacked. Trevor-Roper was a leading player over the so-called "storm over the gentry", a dispute with Christian Socialist R. H. Tawney and Stone over whether the English Gentry were in economic decline or were in economic advancement in the century before the English Civil War and, regardless of whether the gentry were rising or not, did this have anything to do with the outbreak of war in 1642 . His attacks on the philosophies of history advanced by the historians Arnold J. Toynbee and Edward Hallett Carr , and on his colleague A. J. P. Taylor 's account of the origins of World War II , also won Trevor-Roper wide recognition. He frequently published articles and book reviews in newspapers and magazines directed to the general public (some of which were collected in his book ''Historical Essays'' in 1957 ), and appeared occasionally on television. On October 4 , 1954 , Trevor-Roper married Lady Alexandra Henrietta Louisa Howard-Johnston ( March 9 , 1907 - August 15 , 1997 ), eldest daughter of Field Marshal The Earl Haig by his wife, the former Hon. Dorothy Maud Vivian. Lady Alexandra was a goddaughter of Queen Alexandra , and had previously been married to Rear-Admiral Clarence Dinsmore Howard-Johnston , by whom she had had three children. His brother, Patrick Trevor-Roper , was a leading eye surgeon and prominent Gay Rights campaigner. He was awarded a Life Peerage in 1979 , and chose the title "Baron Dacre of Glanton". At the age of sixty-seven, Trevor-Roper became Master of Peterhouse , Cambridge . His election to this position, which surprised his contemporaries, was engineered by a group of fellows led by Maurice Cowling , then the leading Peterhouse Historian . Despite this, Trevor-Roper's relations with the fellowship (and indeed the Porters ) of Peterhouse subsequently proved to be confrontational. The nadir of Trevor-Roper's career came in 1983 , when, along with others, he authenticated the so-called '' Hitler Diaries '', which later forensic examination proved to be a fake. This raised questions in the public mind not only about his perspicacity as a historian but also about his personal integrity, because '' The Sunday Times '', a newspaper to which he regularly contributed book reviews and in whose parent company he held a financial interest, had already paid a considerable sum for the right to serialise the diaries. Baron Dacre denied any dishonest motivation, insisting that he, like others, had made a genuine mistake. It was after this mistake that '' Private Eye '' nicknamed Trevor-Roper as ''Hugh Very-Ropey''. Despite the shadow that this incident cast over his later career, he continued writing (producing ''Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans'' in 1987 , for example), and his work continued to be well received. Baron Dacre of Glanton died of Cancer in a Hospice in Oxford , aged 89. WORK
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