As a diarist, Trevor-Roper is naughty, nasty, smart, and funny. In person he could be charming and he could be a boor. In the end, he becomes as much a comic figure as the people he skewers. Almost as many pages of his China journals are given to poisonous pen portraits of his compatriots as to his fumbling encounters with the world he has come to see. The book is a fascinating document of frustration. Included are journals that Trevor-Roper wrote after he got home, when he and Bolt vowed that ‘nothing, nothing, nothing would ever lead us back to China’. He was determined to get even by exposing SACU as a Chinese Communist Party front. Part of his revenge was a long article for Encounter, the Cold War magazine that the CIA partly funded, intended to expose SACU’s smoke-and-mirrors financing and management. ‘It is just like China itself,’ Trevor-Roper claimed. On legal advice, the essay was never published. It appears here along with later travel diaries from Taiwan and Cambodia and relevant appendices about the dramatis personae in the farce. The editor, Richard Davenport-Hines, adds a helpful introduction and much droll annotation. Bear in mind that Trevor-Roper was very grand and knew everyone. Here, as an example, is the editor’s note on a mention of ‘a young friend from Scotland’ in the Encounter essay: ‘John Baillie-Hamilton, Lord Binning, afterwards 13th Earl of Haddington (1941–2016), Patron of the Centre for Crop Circle Studies, student of the paranormal and editor-publisher of a periodical, Bird Talk, dedicated to preserving small songbirds from cats.’

Hugh Trevor-Roper signs a book for a bellman while the philosopher Alfred Jules Ayer looks on, 1950s (Hannes Betzler/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy)

Davenport-Hines does well on the Chinese material, though he fails to identify the ‘sensible, intelligent and civilised’ young woman from Bristol whom Trevor-Roper meets in Xian. She told him that ‘the Chinese only want the English language and it must be entirely divorced from English ideas, English history, English life’. She lives in Adelaide now.

Trevor-Roper joined SACU out of admiration for its president, Joseph Needham, the Cambridge biochemist and historian whose multi-volume Science and Civilisation in China remains a monument of interdisciplinary scholarship. Despite the ideological gulf between them, Needham and Trevor-Roper shared a commitment to greater understanding of China. ‘Of non-European civilisations it was the Chinese that interested [Trevor-Roper] most,’ Davenport-Hines explains. But the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that Trevor-Roper experienced in 1965, then in its sixteenth year and heading into the Cultural Revolution, defeated his powers of analysis. He diagnoses a ‘tension between China – historic China, Chinese society – and the communist party’, but looks in vain for ‘the pattern of centuries’ to provide a historical key: ‘Between Czarism and Bolsheviks there is the continuity of despotism. Between Frederick the Great and Hitler there is the continuity of militarism. But between imperial China and communist China I see no continuity, only a … total, emphatic reversal.’

He misses how history is written in China, with each dynasty marking a new beginning. The communist era is no different. Had he lived to experience Xi Jinping’s China Dream, he would see how the history that the PRC has constructed for itself becomes a narrative from which there is no escape. It starts with the victimisation of the Opium Wars and ends with the reclamation of lost territory, from the South China Sea to the Himalayas.

As I watch aghast the dismantling of Australia’s relationship with China, after five decades of careful management in our national interest, I am struck by how some things don’t change. In 1965, China was as assertive as it is today. Yet when Trevor-Roper hears the ‘hymns of hate against U.S. imperialism’ at the National Day celebrations in Beijing, he doesn’t take it too seriously. He dislikes the ‘panic fear of communism’ that he finds in Americans. He wryly notes Zhou Enlai’s use of ‘tit for tat’ as a description of the Chinese approach to diplomacy. ‘Tit for tat’ is a translation of a tougher phrase in Chinese and is a favourite of China’s Foreign Ministry to this day, as we’ve heard often of late in relation to China and Australia. Whose tit for whose tat?

When relations broke down between Needham and Trevor-Roper over the SACU affair, Needham wrote sagely to his colleague:

To start with an openly unfriendly, unsympathetic, provocative or merely destructively critical attitude is to be sure of not getting anywhere. I speak from long personal experience. Understanding … implies a certain friendliness, and this in turn implies a measure of humility, that quality without which intellectuals like ourselves can never get to apprehend …

Trevor-Roper had made his name with The Last Days of Hitler (1947), a work of archival detection that followed on from his wartime work with British intelligence. He was part sleuth, part spy. Four decades later, he would be wrong-footed when he declared the amateurishly forged Hitler diaries to be the real thing. In between, he produced another brilliant piece of forensic exposé, this time on an Anglo-Chinese subject. Hermit of Peking: The hidden life of Sir Edmund Backhouse (1976) is an account of the forger and fantasist who provided the Bodleian Library with a significant part of its China collection. The historian had a feel for fakery, sometimes.