Sometimes sheer ignorance led Trevor-Roper into error. He dismissed the highly civilised and learned Dame Edna Everage, as "a male clown who appears in drag for the diversion of the vulgar". He was also very careful not to disclose his evident misgivings about such prominent and powerful Oxford dons as Maurice Bowra and Lord Blake. His relationship with Noel Annan, the big cheese in Cambridge, was, on my reading of his letters, distinctly edgy. In short, Trevor-Roper always played it safe. 

Then the fates struck. Trevor-Roper's first mistake was to accept the blandishments of the Peterhouse dons, under the leadership of Maurice Cowling, who persuaded him to become Master of the college. This was based on an extraordinary misapprehension by Cowling that Trevor-Roper was a right-winger who would further his desire to turn the college into a bastion of reaction. In fact Trevor-Roper was a subversive, and used his new position to make endless trouble in what he considered an inferior university and a benighted college. The dons of Peterhouse, he considered, were "a grim Druid Church" or a "Women's Institute at Ely". "Dons in general, I fear," he wrote, "are boors." What happened at Peterhouse certainly proved this proposition. Immense unhappiness, over many years, was generated by this acrimonious conflict, which achieved absolutely nothing but the breeding of malice. The senior common room at Peterhouse was the perfect setting for Trevor-Roper's worst gifts. But he himself was also permanently damaged by the row, which took up all his intellectual and social energies for many years. He could have written his "huge book in three volumes" easily in the time he devoted to this futile vendetta.

Then, to the delight of his enemies in Cambridge — and Oxford too — came the Hitler diaries disaster. Under pressure from Rupert Murdoch, Trevor-Roper agreed to authenticate the diary, though he withdrew his approval after a few days. I was amazed that Trevor-Roper fell into this obvious media trap. Hitler was the last man in Germany to have kept diaries. I imagine that when he was a young soldier, just promoted corporal in the First World War, a senior NCO had said to him: "Look here, young fellow, let me give you some advice: never put anything in writing. It will only get you into trouble." If so, Hitler remembered the advice all his life. No senior figure, on either side and in either world war, ever issued fewer written orders. They are almost non-existent. The idea of Hitler keeping a diary, that endless hostage to fortune, is almost inconceivable to anyone who studied his mentality and record. Clearly, Trevor-Roper knew much less about Hitler than his reputation suggested. But then The Last Days had been written many years before. Trevor-Roper was also wrong-footed by his close financial connections with Murdoch and his papers. A.J.P. Taylor, though much closer to Beaverbrook, would never have allowed his judgment to be so distorted on a historical matter.

At the time, though I had never liked Trevor-Roper, I felt so sorry for him that I wrote him a letter begging him not to let the scandal pull him down, and to turn his mind to fresh matters. He replied that he was learning who his true friends were. His self-examination at this time was, I think, the beginning of his redemption. Of course he never quite recovered his reputation. He will always be known as the professor who authenticated the Hitler diaries. But in a profound sense, he improved morally after this catastrophe. And his regeneration enabled him to face other personal calamities, especially the death of his wife, which left him, to his surprise, dreadfully lonely and forlorn, and his debilitating blindness. When we met, as we occasionally did, I always found him friendly and amiable, which I never had done before. The malice seemed to have gone, completely. Rowse's exasperated query, quoted in this book, "Why are you so nasty to people?" no longer applied. Trevor-Roper had become nice to people. It was a pleasure to meet him and have a chat. Thus fortune, or the fates, or divine providence, or whatever God watches over us, moves in mysterious ways, and History marches on.