Hugh Trevor-Roper's Downfall

Such is the hunger for new books about Nazi Germany that authors have begun chronicling the chroniclers. Last autumn Newsday editor Steve Wick wrote The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a history of the famous journalist’s dispatches from Berlin in the 1930s. The latest arrival in this genre is Adam Sisman’s An Honourable Englishman: The Life of Hugh Trevor- Roper, a portrait of one of the most stylish historians of Adolph Hitler. This type of book is bizarre: the reader already knows about the Third Reich, yet can watch someone else learning about it for the first time and in this way refresh the horror. Whether or not the publishing trend is a gimmick, it can produce fine books. An Honourable Englishman is witty, incisive, and hugely entertaining.