The English historian George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876-1962) is known for his defense and illustration of history as a literary art.

George Macaulay Trevelyan was born at Welcombe near Stratford-on-Avon on Feb. 16, 1876, the son of Sir George Otto Trevelyan. His maternal granduncle was the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay. Young Trevelyan went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ralph Vaughan Williams were among his friends. In 1898, his imagination caught by what he saw as the first stirring of national consciousness and individual freedom among the 14th century Lollards, he wrote England in the Age of Wycliffe as a dissertation for a Trinity fellowship. An immediate success, it remains one of the best books on the subject.

Awarded the fellowship, Trevelyan set out upon an academic career. Cambridge, however, was then dominated by a highly critical mode of historical writing, soon to be epitomized by J...