Baron Dacre, the historian whose name was made and then almost destroyed by his lasting interest in Hitler, died of cancer in an Oxford hospice yesterday at the age of 89.

A man with broad historical interests and a lover of academic controversy, the former Hugh Trevor-Roper was made a Tory life peer in 1979 and became one of the leading scholars of his generation.

In 1983, as a distinguished academic, life peer and director of Times Newspapers, he was the obvious choice to be consulted over the Hitler diaries, which the Sunday Times and Stern magazine planned to publish if they could be shown to be genuine.

Lord Dacre gave the required authentication - and then had to make a hugely embarrassing climbdown when they turned out to be a hoax.

The 61 volumes of the diaries, which had allegedly turned up in East Germany, turned out to be the work of Konrad Kujau who had been handsomely paid by both newspaper and magazine but was later jailed.

Born the son of a country doctor in Northumberland, Lord Dacre went to Charterhouse before beginning a 40-year association with Oxford. In 1980 he became master of Peterhouse, Cambridge.

He had made his reputation with The Last Days Of Hitler (1947), a book that grew from a commission by the intelligence services to discover what had happened to Hitler as Germany crumbled under the allied onslaught.

Lord Dacre produced 19 books in a 50-year writing career in which he had celebrated clashes with RH Tawney and Lawrence Stone over the economic causes of the English civil war, and also with AJP Taylor over the origins of the second world war.