But even these pleasures seem sometimes to have paled in comparison with those of the English landscape, and, above all, those to be derived from cantering through that landscape after a pack of hounds. For a notoriously myopic man, Hugh Trevor-Roper had a surprisingly observant and painterly eye. Hunting on a September afternoon on the high moors of coastal Northumberland, he "marvelled to see that whole long stretch of countryside coloured and variegated by the cloud-broken autumn sunlight, as it picked out and enhanced, through that bright, transparent air, the purple, the green, the yellow-grey, and the blue." And in an entry simply called "Happiness" he recalled a day with the Bicester hunt: "the grey, melancholy winter landskip, with floods lying in the hollow fields, and then the death, at twilight, in the corner of a flooded meadow off the main road at Blackthorn, amid a small circle of steaming horses, and the doleful music of the horn — most magical and solemn of noises when hounds are blown home on a grey winter's evening."

These passages — so personal, and, whether despite or because of all the prose-polishing that has gone into them, so direct and authentic in their conveying of the experience itself — are the sort that linger most strongly in the memory after reading this book. But there are many other memorable things here. Some have already been put to use in Adam Sisman's excellent recent biography of Trevor-Roper: accounts of his dismal childhood; the story of his ill-fated wartime visit to Ireland and his presumed betrayal to the Irish police by Lord Longford; dismissive remarks about dry-as-dust Christ Church dons, and increasingly intolerant comments on the truly intolerable A.L. Rowse (for which Trevor-Roper's index entries supply a suitable running commentary: "Rowse, A.L.: poor old, becoming a bore; his deplorable autobiography; once influenced me; a talented shit; touched in the brain").

Many passages here are new, however: the detailed account of the book he half-seriously planned to write, entitled A History of the English Ruling Classes; a respectful but compelling statement of why, in the end, Macaulay will not do as a writer; a marvellous celebration of C.M. Doughty's Arabia Deserta (a discovery of the wartime years); and many reports of the wit and aloof cynicism of his friend Gilbert Ryle, capped by Trevor-Roper's own perceptive and ever so slightly devastating analysis of Ryle's character — or lack of it.

The book has been superbly edited by Richard Davenport-Hines, whose notes are models of both pithiness and omniscience. (Only the quotations of, and translations from, German fall below this general standard.) Was it worth lavishing so much care on such a text? The answer must be "yes". 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.