The day I had to pour soup over a fire in Hugh Trevor-Roper's kitchen

FRANK JOHNSON

Hugh Trevor-Roper long refused to write his memoirs. Eventually, the firm of Weidenfeld persuaded him, if he was not going to write them, to speak them. The recipient of his reminiscences was to be a tape recorder and I.

He agreed to talk to me because — I speculate — I knew him, but not too well. Also, I was not an academic and would therefore not know too much about the donnish politics that consumed him almost as much as any other kind of politics. Furthermore, I made it obvious that I idolised him. This idolising began long before I ever met him, with The Last Days of Hitler and the first volume of essays. I did not much follow him into the 17th century, officially his speciality; perhaps another reason why, from his point of view, I was a suitable interlocutor.

Moreover, he liked the company of journalists and he liked journalism, no matter how often he deplored both. He was himself a journalist. I do not just mean a practitioner of the higher journalism of which many of his essays were originally a part. I suspected in him a journalist by nature. He would have made an excellent gossip columnist in the days when the broadsheets gossiped about the world of which he was a part.

'I enjoy conversation more than I enjoy writing,' I find him saying on one tape.

FJ: 'Gossip?'

HT-R: 'Gossip, as you say, yes.'

FJ: 'Academic gossip above all?'

HT-R: 'No, academic gossip can be rather boring.'

FJ: 'Political gossip? Who's up and who's down at Westminster?'

HT-R: 'Social gossip. I like a certain intellectual flavour to it, though.'

Every few weeks for a year or so I made the journey by car or train to Didcot with my tape recorder. He lived in the Old Rectory. One could have been in a house suitably set amid glorious acres. There was a lovely garden. But 100 yards away there was a council estate. At the bottom of the road there were the mighty cooling towers which stand sentinel over the Thames Valley. I could not work out whether he was prepared to endure all that because he could not afford a rectory in a grander setting, or whether he did not worry about the neighbourhood, in which case he was a lot less snobbish than his detractors said.

He had beautiful manners, at least towards this guest. He would insist on cooking me lunch. This was hazardous, since at the time he was going blind. Eventually, a miraculous operation restored much of his sight; only for cancer to seize him.

Every now and then the cooker would catch fire. 'Water! Water!' he would cry. 'The trouble is: I can't see.' But he did not say this with any air of panic; instead, his tone would be completely matter-of-fact as the flames rose. I would be much less calm. I would turn on the nearest tap. and search for a suitable receptacle. 'I've doused the blaze,' I once told him, 'though possibly with the soup.' He replied that that was all to the good, since it was not the wine. He would then spear the tablecloth several times with the corkscrew as he sought the cork, talking the while: 'Now remind me, what was your question? Do I see a comparison between Habsburg Spain, as the first modern superpower, and the contemporary United States. I think so.' Me: 'These lamb chops have turned out delicious. I like them a bit charred. I think we've done enough on the Habsburg comparison, don't you?'

I had decided to be chronological. I started with his childhood which, as this week's obituaries pointed out, was as modest as he later became grand, and may explain the grandeur. My plan was to weave into the narrative his reflections on what was happening in the world at successive stages of his life. But he was always saying things which would amaze me, and off we would go at a tangent. 'Frank Longford once tried to have me arrested during the war for betraying secrets to the enemy,' was one such observation, inducing on my part a long and excited detour.

His views were moderate, without being boring: an extraordinary feat. Nor were they particularly right-wing. He was as contemptuous of intellectuals of the ideological Right as of the ideological Left. He did not think that the Soviet Union collapsed because of Reagan and Thatcher, despite my constant attempts to persuade him to say so. He was amusing about being one of the Germanists, whom Lady Thatcher called to a Chequers meeting on the assumption that they would say that Germany was as big a danger as ever. They all told her the opposite. Nonetheless, he claimed, the civil service minute reflected her views, not theirs. He was scathing about the well-known civil servant who he said wrote it.

But there were no liberal pieties. When I asked him if he thought there was 'something in the German character that submits to authority', he replied: 'Well I do, actually.' He went on to describe how the Germans, with whom he was billeted after the war, had fawned on him. He thought that, had the Germans occupied us, a hotel manager and his wife in Henley or Richmond would at least have served them 'with bad grace'.

He did not think he deserved to become Regius professor. He was given it because of Macmillan, he said, who for some reason liked him. Had Eden remained prime minister, he would not have got it.

But, moderate though his views were of events and trends, there was a certain disproportion elsewhere; shown, as I have said, by academic politics inspiring in him as much interest as those of any country or war. That meant above all his Mastership of Peterhouse. How those Fellows intrigued against him, once he proved not to be their creature!

And, presumably, how he intrigued against them, though he did not go into that. Of certain of the group which he said intrigued against him, he observed that he had nothing against snobbery, Catholicism or homosexuality in themselves 'but when all three are combined in an amalgam or syndrome, then I'm afraid my prejudices are aroused.'

Then, inevitably, came the Hitler diaries. His replies were broadly on the lines of those in Graham Turner's Daily Telegraph interview published posthumously this week. Namely, he accepted the blame at the time, under the impression that the Times and Sunday Times journalists concerned would do so too, which he said they did not.

'What was the attitude of the Peterhouse mafia [to his humiliationl?' I asked. 'Oh they were delighted.' How did he know? 'I'm not quite sure, but I could tell that they were delighted.' He admitted to being shaken. Perhaps he remained so from then on. More fatefully than ever, donnish politics and history had disproportionately conjoined.

In the end, and to the end, he prevaricated as to whether the interviews should be published. To me he would say that I had made him more indiscreet than he would wish. To others he would say that I had not asked him the right questions, though he never said what the right questions were. He was worried about his answers as prose, even though they were spoken, not written, and he was the finest talker in our language. Those involved with his books say that it was often hard to persuade him to let go, and agree to publication. Nonetheless, I shall cherish the memory of our conversations, and of him, for the rest of my life.