Battling the left-wing historians of the 1950s and 60s, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who died on January 26, 2003, used his eloquence, wit and keen sense of irony to throw open the doors of stuffy academic history to a bright new world.

A near polymath in his grasp of the ebb and flow of history, its cadences and aberrations, Mr Trevor-Roper deliberately employed the more democratic essay form to cover an astonishing variety of historical subject matter in books, newspapers and magazines.

But behind his engaging style lay a serious philosophical attempt to undermine the Marxist schools of historical thought that reduced historical analysis to dry issues of class and economics.

So it was all the more surprising that, having spent almost 40 years refining a mixture of popular polemic and profound analysis, Mr Trevor-Roper should have thought that a 60-volume diary penned by a fraudster was in fact the work of the Fuhrer himself.

Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper was born on January 15, 1914 in Glanton, Northumberland, and at Christ Church College , Oxford , he initially read classics before changing to history and completing his first book “Archbishop Laud” by the outbreak of World War 2.

Working in the radio security and intelligence services during the war, Trevor-Roper became an authority on the inner workings of the German war machine, and in the aftermath of Hitler’s downfall, the British Government commissioned him to investigate the Fuhrer’s death, from which he produced the book that made his name, “The Last Days of Hitler” in 1947.

This proved to be his one work of distinctive length, but it was for the sheer breadth of his historical analysis that Mr Trevor-Roper garnered the most plaudits. His 50-year academic career spanned seamlessly between medieval Christian Europe, cold war Soviet double agents, a devastating exposé of the Victorian Sinologist, Sir Edmund Backhouse and pre-civil war England to name but a few of his subjects.

On the latter, in the early 1950s, Mr Trevor-Roper penned a refreshing antithesis to Lawrence Stone’s Marxist interpretation of the war, arguing that the English gentry had been in decline before the conflict and thus sowing the seeds of academic debate that bore fruit for many years to come.

In 1957, Mr Trevor-Roper published “Historical Essays” and became Oxford Regius professor of modern history, providing him with a mandate for his manifesto of wide-ranging history that engaged people, moved back and forth between past and present and different historical eras to find similarities and distinctions - an historical philosophy borne of Mr Trevor-Roper’s sweeping intellectual curiosity.

He continued to broaden his own horizons, offering an alternative perspective to AJP Taylor’s “The Origins of the Second World War” in 1959, writing anonymous mischievous accounts of Oxford life for The Spectator , numerous reviews and articles for newspapers and appearing on television.

In the late 60s, his output was prodigious, using the essay form to span a dizzying breadth of history, publishing “The Reformation and Social Change” in 1967; “The Philby Affair” in 1968, documenting the fall of his one-time friend, Soviet double agent, K im Philby; “The European Witch-Craze of the 17th Century” and “The Plunder of the Arts in the 17th Century” in 1970.

Having cast his eye so authoritatively over a broad sweep of history, he besmirched his standing on familiar ground when in 1983 he declared that the Hitler diaries, for which The Sunday Times had paid a fortune to serialise, were the real thing, only to retract his statement two weeks later.

That Mr Trevor-Roper was a director of The Times during the debacle only muddied the waters further, but when in 1987 he retired from Peterhouse, Cambridge , of which he had been master since 1980, he had recovered sufficiently to write two new essay collections on the renaissance and 17th century religion, and one more followed in 1992.

Mr Trevor-Roper married Lady Alexandra Henrietta Louisa Howard-Johnston, eldest daughter of Field Marshal Haig, in 1954, and took on her three children from a previous marriage.

In 1979, he was made a Conservative life peer, adopting the title Baron Dacre of Glanton, and when in the 90s, he moved to Didcot, it was for its proximity to Oxford and London , where he would often attend debates at the House of Lords.

Throughout his career, Mr Trevor-Roper sought to assuage the leftist interpretation of history as an inevitable sequence of class-based events, challenging such ideas in breadth and in detail with a form of writing that opened historical debate up to a new, public audience.

Popular but never populist, Mr Trevor-Roper himself came to the conclusion that, in fact, “pure farce” was a more important element in history than economics.