G.M. Trevelyan: A Life in History

"During the first half of the twentieth century Trevelyan was the most famous, the most honored, the most influential and the most widely read historian of his generation. He was a scion of the greatest historical dynasty that [Britain] has ever produced. He knew and corresponded with many of the greatest figures of his time....For fifty years, Trevelyan acted as a public moralist, public teacher and public benefactor, wielding unchallenged cultural authority among the governing and the educated classes of his day."
So David Cannadine writes in the Preface to his life of Trevelyan. Described by a contemporary as "probably the most widely read historian in the world; perhaps in the history of the world," Trevelyan fired the imaginations of millions of readers with his stirring books on Garibaldi, his magisterial history of England, and his vivid English Social history. Trevelyan's broad appeal lay in the lyrical beauty of his prose and in his moral purpose to make sense of the past and show in it the unfolding progress of mankind.
Trevelyan's optimism and secure cultural bearings, sorely tested in his own time by two world wars, speak of a lost way of life. He was a member by birth of the aristocracies of privilege and intellect, a man who "never applied for a job he did not get; indeed, apart from his Trinity Fellowship, he never applied for a job at all." He was at home in the circles of high politics during the period from the First World War into the age of Churchill. And yet the churning social and cultural currents of the postwar years would erode the peak of influence Trevelyan had attained, creating a far different intellectual landscape.
Cannadine, whose great theme is the decline of a self-confident, aristocratic, imperial Britain, continues that story here with the focus on Trevelyan, the aristocratic Whig historian so powerful and popular in his time and now so tellingly out of favor. Cannadine goes on trenchantly but not uncritically to defend Trevelyan's view of history and the ends of historical study: The author sees in his writing a humanity which our contemporaries so often lack.