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Books

Hugh Trevor-Roper: the spy as historian, the historian as spy

A review of ‘The Secret World’, by Hugh Trevor-Roper. The future Lord Dacre's early work for MI6 shaped the rest of his life

20 September 2014

9:00 AM

20 September 2014

9:00 AM

The Secret World Hugh Trevor-Roper, edited by E.D.R. Harrison

I.B. Tauris, pp.224, £25, ISBN: 9781780762081

Shortly after the war began in September 1939, the branch of the intelligence services called MI8, or the Radio Security Service, recruited H.R. Trevor-Roper (as his name would appear the following year on the title page of his first book, his acerbic and somewhat anti-clerical life of Archbishop Laud). He was a young Oxford don, or would-be don, a research fellow of Merton.

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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £22.50. Tel: 08430 600033. Geoffrey Wheatcroft was literary editor 1977-81.

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