When up for a lecturership at Oxford in 1998, I received notice to report for an interview at the Indian Institute, then the home of the Faculty of Modern History, in the Trevor-Roper Room. I possessed the maturity to refrain from saying aloud, though not to refrain from thinking, “Are we sure it’s really the Trevor-Roper Room, and not a tea-stained forgery?” Which is a very unfair thing to think about a distinguished historian, but in my defense I was young and the episode of the faked Hitler diaries, during which Hugh Trevor-Roper was briefly taken in by the forgeries, tea-stained to give the appearance of age, was fresh in memory. It might have been the first time I thought about what professional historians got up to.
The BBC has a good article looking back at the story of the Hitler diaries forgery of 1983. Despite the url, there, it looks like Murdoch was not so much fooled as determined to have a story for the Sunday Times. And I felt bad for Lord Dacre, aka Trevor-Roper:
“I must say as a historian, I regret that the normal methods of historical verification have, perhaps necessarily, been to some extent sacrificed to the requirements of the journalistic scoop,” he said.
This episode was also the occasion for one of my favorite comic strips of all time, the Bloom County bit in which Milo forges (for fun and a news sensation) the diaries of Margaret Mead.
It was, and remains, a delight to me that this strip riffed on a contemporary news story in such a way as to make a joke which required you to know enough about Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa to laugh.