Trevor- Roper constantly measured himself against the two great masters of English historical writing Macaulay and Edward Gibbon.

ECONOMIST: A historian created and destroyed by Hitler

That is the gist of some virtuoso invective by Hugh Trevor-Roper, a British historian who died in 2003.

ECONOMIST: Britain��s first modern philosopher

Trevor-Roper, ennobled as Lord Dacre by Margaret Thatcher in 1979, was ludicrously talented.

ECONOMIST: A historian created and destroyed by Hitler

Instead, Trevor-Roper produced several full-length books as well as dozens of brilliant essays.

ECONOMIST: A historian created and destroyed by Hitler

By Trevor-Roper's day history had become too professionalised to allow anybody to range over the centuries in the way that Gibbon did.

ECONOMIST: A historian created and destroyed by Hitler

Trevor-Roper's failure to write a great work was not only a verdict on his own psychology, it was a verdict on the shrunken state of post-war Britain.

ECONOMIST: A historian created and destroyed by Hitler

He spends too much time quoting obscure reviewers and reciting minor academic quarrels, and says too little about Trevor-Roper's place in the great tradition of British historians.

ECONOMIST: A historian created and destroyed by Hitler

The title was held by the late historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and the 18th Century poet Thomas Gray, who was Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge.

BBC: Open University Milton Keynes professor given royal award