Hugh Trevor-Roper was probably the greatest letter writer of what Noel Annan called 'our age', corresponding with almost anybody who was anybody, and in a style that was both inimitable and incomparable. This latest anthology is by turns memorable, fascinating, wicked and malicious, and impossible to put down.
Sir David Cannadine
A superb selection ... The book makes a hugely entertaining volume ... it should be treated as a salient part of [Trevor-Ropers'] oeuvre.
Paul Johnson, Standpoint
100 letters that show this brilliant, difficult man in a new light ... The many Trevor-Ropers of this collection ... together make a complex but fascinating creature ... '
John Gallagher, Sunday Telegraph
A splendid introduction to this delightful, funny, ebullient and relentless person ... The present volume is beautifully produced and the selection from the voluminous correspondence is particularly well judged.
John Banville, The Guardian
Beguiling ... This volume isn't peripheral, but central to a career of fluctuating accomplishment ... Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue couldn't have blended sugar and acid more silkily.
Peter Preston, The Observer
The quality of the prose is so sparkling, the wit is so sharp, and the Enlightenment standpoint so carefully nourished, that the book serves not only as entertainment, but as a manifesto for the intellectual values that were Hugh Trevor-Roper's lodestar.
A.N Wilson, Times Literary Supplement
What better way to celebrate the centenary of Trevor-Roper's birth than to treat the reading public to a hundred of his letters? ... Collected by two editors who really know the territory and who really understand the ethos of the period, Hugh Trevor-Roper's letters are a marvellous evocation of a world now completely vanished.
Leslie Mitchell, Literary Review
Trevor-Roper was ... one of the great prose stylists of our times ... and in this magnificent collection of letters dating from the war years until shortly before his death in 2003, he lays into "impertinent adversaries" with wit and gusto ... He would have been delighted to know that his letters ... have been impeccably edited.
Jeremy Lewis, The Oldie
A masterly editorial touch ... [the editors have] succeeded both in choosing letters of the highest standard and in creating what amounts to a supplementary biography, enhanced by vital, Gibbonian footnotes ... [Trevor-Roper] would surely be delighted that the last ten years have already produced a fruitful harvest of posthumous books, to which these Hundred Letters are both a stylish addition and an admirable tribute to his hundredth birthday.
John Saumarez Smith, Country Life
This is a significant reference work without many, if any, serious competitors for both scope and content. Any libraries supporting a literature collection need to update their reference holdings by including this Companion.
Reference Reviews