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Jump to navigationJump to searchLetters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson by Richard Davenport-Hines (Editor) (view source)
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Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper and art critic Bernard Berenson met in 1947 (the year that Trevor-Roper's most famous work [[''The Last Days of Hitler]] '' was published) and there was an immediate rapport between the two. The meeting took place at Berenson's Florentine villa, I Tatti, and it was to be the start of a correspondence that continued until Berenson's death in 1959. Despite a difference in ages of nearly half a century this was a profound and moving friendship by two people pre-eminent in their professions.
In many ways you have to appreciate what this book isn't before you can appreciate what it is. The letters were sent to Berenson in a private capacity and were not written for publication. In fact Trevor-Roper did say that he thought that if the letters came back to him he would destroy them. He was well aware that he could be indiscreet: '' I shudder to think of some of the things I sometimes say!''. This is, of course, great fun for the reader, but it does mean that the writer will be judged - and harshly in some quarters - on the basis of comments which anyone of us might mutter to a friend but moderate before a wider audience.
