If the laws of libel permit, future volumes collecting letters to other correspondents may follow. In the meantime, this one has certainly whetted my appetite for the forthcoming biography of Trevor-Roper by Adam Sisman.. Her bridegroom, the Prince of Wales (later George IV), had to get drunk to go through with the marriage. Richard Davenport-Hines has written an enjoyably astute introduction, and provided judicious annotation (though Amy Robsart is not just a fictional character, she's a historical one too). The Duchess of Roxburgh is being starved out of the ducal home by the Duke, while, throughout, Berenson is kept informed of Trevor-Roper's own romantic travails as he tries to win Xandra, daughter of Earl Haig, from her unsympathetic husband, a man who rather than carrying a photo of his wife and children, carries one of himself with a large fish.These letters offer sheer, unadulterated pleasure. "I am sure they are exact and competent articles; but since the author of them touches nothing that he does not dessicate, I cannot find anyone who has read them." Above all, Trevor-Roper loves controversy and the scent of battle, whether it's demolishing the rival historian Lawrence Stone - "he decided to get well known quickly; and the terrifying thing is that he succeeded" - or proposing Himmler's masseur, who had saved Jews from Nazi captivity, for the Nobel Peace Prize.In the wider world, high society gossip is conveyed with superb malice.

George VI is being killed by his domestic surgeon, "a brassy Scot", who has put the king on a diet of herbs, and removed one of his lungs: "afterwards the royal lung was devoutly carried, wrapped up in The Times newspaper". In one letter, he describes the election of a new Warden of All Souls with "the crescendo of buzzing in the alcoves, the feverish motion from staircase to staircase in these normally somnolent quadrangles". He is unsparing about his colleagues - A L Rowse is "a Cornish egomaniac", A J P Taylor, "the Tom Paine of British Television" - and scathing about the productivity of the average Oxford don. One candidate for a professorial chair is described as having produced, in 25 years, "two slender articles" about the reign of Elizabeth I.

In long letters written over 12 years, until Berenson's death in October 1959, Trevor-Roper was able to satisfy him on both counts. Trevor-Roper was ambivalent about the university, but he was also fascinated by its ancient, creaky machinery, and never more so than when it came to the subterfuge of an Oxford election. Can recite entire sagas about them." He added that his young friend was "A fascinating letter-writer, indeed an epistolary artist..."Berenson craved information from the outside world, and he idealised Oxford University. In his diary a decade later, Berenson wrote that Trevor-Roper was "Cock-sure, arrogant, but without insolence...