All the myths of England come not from the Anglo-Saxons but from the Celts

For what people believe is true is a force, even if it is not true. Myth may be a driving force: such as the myth of inevitability, encountered in Calvin, or of invincibility, as at Sparta. Myth may also be the soul of history, engendering imaginative literature in poetry or prose.

Some races, it seems, are more mythopoeic than others. The myths of ancient Greece are as inseparable from Greek history as they are from Greek literature. The Anglo-Saxons, on the other hand, have been the least mythopoeic of peoples. The English have created one of the great literatures of the world. Yet, have they a singe myth that they can call their own? Almost all peoples have a myth of their own origin: a heroic age; divine descent; the discovery and colonisation of their land. The Anglo-Saxons have no such thing: no halo of romance surrounds the misty figures of their alleged leaders , Hengist and Horsa. All the myths of England come not from the Anglo-Saxons but from the Celts.

H.R. Trevor Roper, The invention of Scotland (2014), xxi

We see the elite of the Thousand-Year Reich a set of flatulent clowns swayed by purely random influences

This scene, as it is described to us, is perhaps overdrawn; but not improbably. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and we have too many accounts of life in that exotic court to doubt the authenticity, in its main lines, even of this. When a staid German general compared Goering to Elagabalus, he. was not exaggerating. In the absolutism, the opulence, and the degeneracy of the middle Roman Empire we can perhaps find the best parallel to the high noonday of the Nazi Reich. There, in the severe pages of Gibbon, we read of characters apparently wielding gigantic authority who, on closer examination, are found to be the pliant creatures of concubines and catamites, of eunuchs and freedmen; and here too we see the elite of the Thousand-Year Reich a set of flatulent clowns swayed by purely random influences. Even Mussolini was embarrassed; but then Mussolini had after all, like Goebbels, a Latin mind; he could never be at home among these cavorting Nibelungs. Goebbels, incidentally, was not present at this Mad Hatter’s tea-party; he was in Berlin, giving orders for the suppression of the revolt.

H. Trevor-Roper, The last days of Hitler (1947, 7th edn. 1995), 29

The offence of Russia was the existence of Russia

This Eastern policy was essential to Nazism; all other positive aims — the conquest of France or Britain — were subsidiary and incidental to it. The offence of France was its traditional policy of Eastern alliances, which had enabled it, for three centuries, to intervene in Germany. The offence of Britain was its refusal to be content with a maritime supremacy, its insistent tradition of preventing the domination of Europe by a single continental power. But the offence of Russia was the existence of Russia.

H. Trevor-Roper, The last days of Hitler (1947, 7th edn. 1995), 4-5

I fear I should never be a success at Oxford ... I should never talk or drink enough

'I fear I should never be a success at Oxford ... I should never talk or drink enough.' However, by the post-war period, Cambridge was beginning to develop a reputation - unfortunate in Steven's view - for narrower professionalism. Trevor-Roper diagnosed the same disease at Oxford, and was determined to lead the alliance that would purge it.

M. Dinshaw, Outlandish knight: the Byzantine life of Steven Runciman (2016), 365

History is not merely what happened

History is not merely what happened: it is what happened in the context of what might have happened,

Hugh Trevor-Roper, quoted in J. Adamson, 'England without Cromwell: What if Charles I had avoided the Civil War?', N. Ferguson (ed.), Virtual History (1997), 95