Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton (January 15, 1914 - January 26, 2003) was a notable historian of early modern Britain and Nazi Germany, who became infamous for authenticating the Hitler Diaries, which were later proved to be a hoax.

He was born in Glanton , Northumberland, and educated at Charterhouse and at Christ Church, Oxford. In 1957 he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, a post he held until 1980; subsequently he became Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge. Having achieved his first major success with The Last Days of Hitler (1947), he consolidated his reputation as an authority on the Third Reich with books such as Hitler's Table Talk (1953) and The Goebbels Diaries (1978), although his area of specialty was early modern Britain, especially the period around the English Civil War.

As a British historian, Trevor-Roper was most famous for his disputes with Marxists such as Lawrence Stone and Christopher Hill, whose materialist explanations of the English Civil War he enthusiastically attacked, with much success.

On October 4, 1954, Trevor-Roper married Lady Alexandra Henrietta Louisa Howard-Johnston (March 9, 1907 - August 15, 1997), eldest daughter of Field Marshal the 1st Earl Haig by his wife, the former Hon. Dorothy Maud Vivian. Lady Alexandra was a goddaughter of Queen Alexandra, and had previously been married to Rear-Admiral Clarence Dinsmore Howard-Johnston , by whom she had had three children.

He was awarded a life peerage in 1979, and chose the title "Baron Dacre of Glanton".

The nadir of Dacre's career came in 1983, when, along with others, he authenticated the so-called Hitler Diaries, which later forensic examination proved to be a fake. This raised questions in the public mind not only about his perspicacity as a historian but also about his personal integrity, because The Sunday Times, a newspaper to which he regularly contributed book reviews and in whose parent company he held a financial interest, had already paid a considerable sum for the right to serialise the diaries. Dacre denied any dishonest motivation, insisting that he, like others, had made a genuine mistake. Despite the shadow that this incident cast over his later career, he continued writing (producing Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans in 1987, for example), and his work continued to be well received.

Dacre died of cancer in a hospice in Oxford, aged 89. His brother, Patrick Trevor-Roper, was a leading eye surgeon and prominent gay rights campaigner.

External links

• Obituary from BBC News website
• Obituary from GuardianUnlimited (there are several discrepancies between these sources)
• Obituary posted on newsgroups by Michael Rhodes (probably more trustworthy than the pages above, actually)