The Wartime Journals - Couverture souple

The Wartime Journals should quite simply join the great diaries

Edward Pearce, Tribune

Hugh Trevor-Roper was one of the greatest prose stylists in the English language... a marvellous book, packed with philosophical speculation, historical sketches, ravishingly beautiful nature writing, jokes, squibs, insults and affirmations. The editing is impeccable, and in its way, eccentric and amusing

John Banville, New York Review of Books

A humorous, waspish and intriguing performance

Allan Mallinson, The Times

An excellent bedside book, providing sophisticated entertainment

Adam Sisman, Literary Review

An extraordinarly 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...The book has been superbly edited by Richard Davenport-Hines, whose notes are models of both pithiness and omniscience

Noel Malcolm, Standpoint

Richard Davenport-Hines has ably edited the wartime diaries of Trevor-Roper himself, and they prove vastly more entertaining and intructive than anything the Führer could have written

Nigel Jones, The Daily Telegraph

Richard-Davenport Hines...edits the journals with a wit and scholarship worthy of his subject...the pages of the journal are packed with descriptions of the beauties of the English landscape...that deserve a place in any anthology of English prose. --Michael Howard, TLS

'...with his own sharp, bright footnotes, by Richard Davenport-Hines, The Wartime Journals should quite simply join the great diaries... In the way of great diaries, The Wartime Journals call up the absurdity of detail.' --
Edward Pearce, Tribune

'The book has been superbly edited by Richard Davenport-Hines, whose notes are models of both pithiness and omniscience [...] 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.' --
Noel Malcolm, Standpoint

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. At the same time they offer an engaging - sometimes mischievous - and reflective study of both the human comedy and personal tragedy of wartime.