If anything can redeem the posthumous standing of Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre (1914–2003), Europe’s Physician should do so. But is he thus redeemable? The mixture of spite, gullibility, and suppressio veri which formed Trevor-Roper’s chief contribution to public life over the decades was ruthlessly epitomized in an Encounter piece by A. J. P. Taylor—himself hardly a neophyte in the malice department—when he caught Trevor-Roper redhanded doctoring extracts: His “methods of quotation might … do harm to his reputation as a serious historian, if he had one.” It is tempting to cite at length Trevor-Roper’s newly published letters, written with the obvious expectation of a voyeuristic posterity. Suffice it to note that he accused C. S. Lewis (“a purple-faced bachelor and misogynist”) of resembling “a hog-reeve or earth-stopper,” as well as, ludicrously enough, of being averse to imaginative writing. His grubby parochial hatred of the Catholic Church incurred bruising punishment by Evelyn Waugh, who demolished as early as 1953 the putative historical basis for Trevor-Roper’s anti-Catholic diatribes.

Mayerne found himself under attack by the Paris medical faculty.

The best to be said for Trevor-Roper the villain is that he probably did less harm than Trevor-Roper the dupe, who officially championed Anglo-Chinese friendship during Mao’s democide, who spouted conspiracy theories about JFK’s assassination, and who supplied (1983) his notorious endorsement of the so-called Hitler Diaries. In this last role, which earned him the nickname “Lord Faker,” he demonstrated an evidentiary slatternliness that should have discredited a child of