'Good writing, like clear thinking, is very hard to teach or to learn. If the writer has something to say, the words come naturally; if not, no amount of instruction will help.'

A new collection of the waspish historian's extensive correspondence, introduced by Alasdair Palmer

Book review of The Wartime Journals by Hugh Trevor-Roper; edited by Richard Davenport-Hines

He is an 18th-century deist with a message for today's aggressive atheists: religion has a social value, and saves us from the return to a Hobbesian state of nature