In a letter to Gerald Brenan in March 1968, Hugh Trevor-Roper stated in the simplest terms his aesthetic position: "I find more pleasure in good literature than in dull (even if true) history." Trevor-Roper had boundless admiration for Brenan, a non-academic, self-taught scholar whose 1943 book The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War had become a classic. Earlier in the same letter, Trevor-Roper paid his friend and colleague the highest compliment: "Ever since I read The Spanish Labyrinth I have looked upon you as my ideal historian – you see the past in the present, and the present in the past, imaginatively, and yet with corrective scholarship, and you express it in perfect prose."

This characterisation could be applied equally well to Trevor-Roper himself. As a historian, he had the finest prose style since Gibbon, one of his abiding heroes ("I think I would rather be thought to write like Gibbon than any other writer of English"); and indeed, for clarity of expression and beauty of form he often outstripped the chronicler of imperial Rome.

Hard work was the engine that drove Trevor-Roper's success. By the time his education was finished – if education ever does finish – he had read all the Greek and Latin classics, and much else besides. In 1942, when he was 28, he noted in his journal: "Since the war began, I have reread a great deal of literature, including all Homer, Pindar, Thucydides, Lucretius, Horace, and much of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton and Tennyson …" Not read, mind you, but reread. Nor was it all pleasure: as he ruefully observed, a scholar must grind his way through many dusty, dull and even worthless books if his own work is to have the sparkle of mastery.

And sparkle it did, and does. He was surely the best-read historian of his age, yet the labour never shows; his midnight oil must have been of the lightest extra-virgin variety. As the editors write in their introduction to this volume: "Trevor-Roper's refusal to be confined to a single historical period or to monolingual sources, still less to any specialist topic, set him apart from those of his contemporaries who wrote big books on the subjects on which they had concentrated at length."

Throughout his career, and especially when he was at the height of his fame, he was subject to repeated criticism for not having produced the "big book" that was expected of him. However, anyone who knows his essays, or even his occasional book reviews, will surely agree that he worked best, and most scintillatingly, in the shorter form. Consider, for instance, the opening piece in his 1957 collection Historical Essays, on "The Holy Land", which in the space of not quite five pages offers a breathtaking overview of the history of three or four millennia of this unendingly turbulent corner of the world.

He was born, a doctor's son, in 1914 in the village of Glanton on the border between Northumberland and Scotland, and sustained a lifelong, fiercely romantic love for his native place. He was proud, too, of his family connections – his ancestor William Roper married the eldest daughter of Sir Thomas More, and at the beginning of the 17th century a nephew of William Roper's was granted the manor house of Teynham in Kent, and later purchased, for the vast sum of £10,000, the title of Baron Teynham. As Trevor-Roper's biographer Adam Sisman has written, "he was always aware that, were a dozen or so intervening cousins to perish a la Kind Hearts and Coronets, he would inherit a peerage". That convenient series of fatalities did not occur, but in 1979 the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, offered him a life peerage, and he took the title Lord Dacre, after another branch of the family.

His childhood was, by his own account, thoroughly miserable. In an impassioned and tormented letter in 1953 to his future wife, Xandra Howard-Johnston, the daughter of Earl Haig, he wrote: "I never heard a word of affection pass between my parents, or from either of them to any of their children. This fact has often astonished me in retrospect; but it had at the time an effect which is very difficult to overcome." The main result of this was a "terrible, almost physical difficulty in expressing emotion". Yet, on the evidence of his correspondence, he was able on many occasions to triumph over this obstacle. Further on in the same letter to Xandra he produces a wonderfully tender, and witty, simile: "I give my heart to you – rather a complicated object, you may say, like a sea urchin, prickly outside and untempting within; but you asked for it and you must connive at some of its limitations."

At Oxford he first studied classics, but grew impatient with the subject and what he saw as the fustiness of the methods of teaching it, and switched to history, which he found altogether more satisfying. It seems not too much to say that through history he discovered the world, his world, the one in which, after the emotional deprivations of childhood, he determined to make as congenial a life for himself as possible.

Writing in 1986 to Alasdair Palmer, a young philosophy graduate whom he had befriended after a chance encounter on a train to Cambridge, he makes the case against the narrow specialisation that was becoming more and more the norm in academe: "A scholar, even for the sake of his scholarship, as well as for that of his life, must have other interests. Scholarship which is confined to one rut becomes antiquarianism: it needs a context, and the possibility of comparison, and the invigorating infusion of reality, and life." Later on in the same letter, responding to Palmer's complaints about the narrowness of college affairs, he identifies "that phenomenon which has come to obsess me: the death of the spirit which threatens every man unless he is conscious of the danger and has a real purpose which can keep it alive and enable it to thrust its way through the choking weeds and thorns to the air and to the sun".

He considered himself a Whig, but in many aspects of his life and career he was an old-fashioned liberal Tory. He looked on the institutions of the state with a healthy disregard – in all his published correspondence there is hardly more than a handful of references to the monarchy in his time – and, following his early mentor Logan Pearsall Smith, seems to have considered it a moral duty to write good English. On the subject of religion he was both sensible and funny: "Surely the whole point of having an Established Church is that we pay our clergy to believe doctrines which we cannot believe ourselves (and indeed why should we? It was they, not we, who invented them), just as we pay the electrician to mend a fault in the wiring which, if we meddled with it ourselves, might well give us a fatal shock."

For those who do not know Trevor-Roper's work, or, indeed, for those who only know the work, One Hundred Letters will be a splendid introduction to this delightful, funny, ebullient and relentless person. The book is a fitting companion to the earlier Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson, and the superlatively entertaining The Wartime Journals, both edited by the tirelessly meticulous, and sometimes suitably irreverent, Richard Davenport-Hines. The present volume is beautifully produced and the selection from the voluminous correspondence is particularly well judged. As the editors remark, they might have concentrated on the mighty ones among his correspondents, such as George Orwell and Harold Macmillan, but preferred to choose "less prominent people".

The public in general knows Trevor-Roper's name mainly because of what he refers to in one of these letters as "the unfortunate affair of the 'Hitler diaries'". He freely admitted the grievous error he had made in authenticating the forgery, but he was unlucky in that, after Rupert Murdoch, he had the highest profile in the affair and therefore became the target of the most brickbats. He believed too that he had been made into a scapegoat. Writing to Frank Giles, editor at the time of the Sunday Times, he set out his belief that he was "badly treated, both by Stern" – the German news magazine that had offered the so-called diaries to the Times management – "which misled me with false evidence of fact … and, to some extent, by the Times, which did not allow me the conditions which I had at first been promised to check the material …"

Some of the warmest and most kindly letters in this volume are addressed to his stepson, James Howard-Johnston. Writing in 1960, when the young man was experiencing the usual worries and insecurities of late adolescence, Trevor-Roper expresses parental sympathy and his faith in the enduring power of language: "Let my last words (for the time being) be these: don't be frightened. If in doubt, if in depression, if in anxiety, say so without fear. We have invented language, refined it so that it can express even the subtlest thought, even the obscurest sensations; why then should we not use it, and dissolve difficulties by articulating them?"