The Wartime Journals
Hugh Trevor-Roper, Richard Davenport-Hines (ed.)
The Wartime Journals
As a British Intelligence Officer during World War II, Hugh Trevor-Roper was expressly forbidden from keeping a diary due to the sensitive and confidential nature of his work. However, he confided a record of his thoughts in a series of slender notebooks inscribed OHMS (On His Majesty's Service). 'The Wartime Journals' reveal the voice and experiences of Trevor-Roper, a war-time 'backroom boy' who spent most of the war engaged in highly-confidential intelligence work in England - including breaking the cipher code of the German secret service, the Abwehr. He became an expert in German resistance plots and after the war interrogated many of Hitler's immediate circle, investigated Hitler's death in the Berlin bunker and personally retrieved Hitler's will from its secret hiding place. The posthumous discovery of Trevor-Roper's secret journals - unknown even to his family and closest confidants - is an exciting archival find and provides an unusual and privileged view of the Allied war effort against Nazi Germany.
4.5 out of 5 based on 5 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Biography, History, Essays, Journals & Letters |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
336 |
| RRP |
£25.00 |
| Date of Publication |
November 2011 |
| ISBN |
978-1848859906 |
| Publisher |
I.B. Tauris |
| |
As a British Intelligence Officer during World War II, Hugh Trevor-Roper was expressly forbidden from keeping a diary due to the sensitive and confidential nature of his work. However, he confided a record of his thoughts in a series of slender notebooks inscribed OHMS (On His Majesty's Service). 'The Wartime Journals' reveal the voice and experiences of Trevor-Roper, a war-time 'backroom boy' who spent most of the war engaged in highly-confidential intelligence work in England - including breaking the cipher code of the German secret service, the Abwehr. He became an expert in German resistance plots and after the war interrogated many of Hitler's immediate circle, investigated Hitler's death in the Berlin bunker and personally retrieved Hitler's will from its secret hiding place. The posthumous discovery of Trevor-Roper's secret journals - unknown even to his family and closest confidants - is an exciting archival find and provides an unusual and privileged view of the Allied war effort against Nazi Germany.
Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography by Adam Sisman
Reviews
Standpoint
Noel Malcolm
"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."
01/01/2012
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The Sunday Telegraph
Nigel Jones
"… as a splendid coda to Sisman’s definitive life, Richard Davenport-Hines has ably edited the wartime diaries of Trevor-Roper himself, and they prove vastly more entertaining and instructive than anything the Führer could have written … It is more of an old-fashioned commonplace-book than a diary, with classical quotes written in ancient Greek; lyrical descriptions of hunting with the Whaddon Chase hounds; or celebrating the bleak beauty of his native Northumberland."
11/01/2012
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The Literary Review
Adam Sisman
"This is an old-fashioned publication, but none the worse for that. Its miscellaneous nature makes it an excellent bedside book, providing sophisticated entertainment as one slips into sleep. The notebooks have been edited by Richard Davenport-Hines with a meticulousness – or perhaps that should be meticulum – that would have pleased their author."
01/12/2011
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The Spectator
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
"Riveting … the most intimate self-portrait we have of this singular man. They take us from Oxford common rooms to the heart of the Secret Intelligence Service, from blitzed London to Trevor-Roper’s beloved Cheviot moors, from dining with Malcolm Muggeridge (‘like picnicking on a volcano’) to the Bicester, with whom he hunted as often as he could."
17/12/2011
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The Times
Allan Mallinson
"... there is little to distinguish the work as a journal of wartime. Only towards the end, with an interesting commentary on the eavesdrops on senior Nazi PoWs, are we sure that the enemy really is German, rather than Trevor-Roper’s alleged social or intellectual inferiors. The account of his research for The Last Days of Hitler is fascinating as a picture of defeated, “colonised” Germany, but nothing very new (indeed, already quoted by Sisman). Nevertheless this is an intriguing book, brilliantly footnoted. What it amounts to, however, is uncertain. Are there clues to his Hitler diaries hoaxing? Probably, yes."
14/11/2011
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