The life to which Trevor-Roper returned, first as a history tutor at Christ Church and then Regius Professor of History with a fellowship at Oriel, seems comfortable and privileged. In the years to come, the success of The Last Days of Hitler ensured that "an infinite, endless, golden shower of American dollars flows ceaselessly into my pockets". But, in comparison with the past, the post-war years have a confined and shrunken quality. Xandra's expensive tastes meant that, notwithstanding his considerable earnings, money was often tight, and journalism became a treadmill. It also used up the energy and time that he wished to devote to a big book on the English Civil War. During the war, he had confided to a notebook his wish to "write a book that someone, one day, will mention in the same breath as Gibbon, — this is my fond ambition". Fond ambition it remained. Finally, there was the melancholy coda of his period as Master of Peterhouse, where he was obliged to conduct a war of attrition with certain elements in the fellowship.

However, with the final decade or so of Trevor-Roper's life, which Sisman barely touches, the picture lightens. Old age did not spare him its customary ills of disease and bereavement; but nor did it deny him gaiety and lightness of heart. His academic battles were long since fought, and surely both the victories and the defeats now meant less to him. His essays from this late period are among his best — rich, relaxed and influential, without recourse to the strong cordial of an adversarial stance. There was more than a touch of Shakespeare's Antony about Trevor-Roper in his final years.

Sisman's notable achievement in this fine biography is to have drawn out the significant shape of this extraordinary 20th-century life.