The Diaries of A L Rowse, edited by Richard Ollard

This popular historian loathed the people, and his own working-class roots. Piers Brendon meets a man of mischief, misanthropy - and misinformation

Vain, wayward, inquisitive, observant and angry, the historian A L Rowse had many qualities that make a good diarist. Above all, he was uninhibited, gaily exposing himself (as he put it, using the word in its old sense) to the gaze of posterity. True, he destroyed some early journals because of their bitterness about his working-class Cornish childhood, from which he progressed to a fellowship at All Souls. But plenty of rage remained. Aged 50, in 1953, he was still cursing his "unloving bitch" of a mother, who "deeply damaged me".

Rowse was catholic in his hatreds. Fellow historians were favourite targets, particularly if they taught at Oxford. Trevor-Roper was vulgar and conceited, A J P Taylor incurably irresponsible, Isaiah Berlin culpably unproductive. Yet despite his own incontinent output, Rowse was denied honours and advancement.

In his case, more did mean worse. But he thought himself the victim of a conspiracy masterminded by envious inferiors in academe, Fleet Street, the BBC and a literary world filled with writers like H G Wells, the "incarnation of the common". The common people themselves – "idiots", "scum" – attracted even greater rancour. Rowse resented being taxed for the upkeep of children of the proletariat: "I don't want to pay for their fucking."

It's fascinating, if dispiriting, to encounter such Swiftian misanthropy and paranoia. Yet Rowse's generally well-written and occasionally poignant diary has more to offer than a tortured psyche. If he loathed people, he was acutely responsive to places. He penned vivid accounts of Lady Ottoline Morrell at Garsington, Sir Charles Trevelyan at Wallington, Sir Winston Churchill (one of his few heroes) at Chartwell. He rhapsodised about Oxford, which never lost its magic for him, and Cornwall. He admired the feel for landscape G M Trevelyan had gained from incessant walking: his "sense of the bone-structure of England".

Rowse also adored architecture, furniture, bibelots, paintings. He could not resist peeping through the door of Léon Blum's house in Paris to glimpse the books and objets d'art. He drooled over the library at Combe Florey, noting that Evelyn Waugh's bookplate incorporated the arms of his wife's family. He went into ecstasies about Newton Ferrers: "O, the colours of the carpets in that room! Dark honey-brown, lemon gold, magenta; the gold china, the coffee-cups; the glints of gold against sage-green."

By contrast, Rowse detested working-class communities. Eastwood, D H Lawrence's birthplace, reminded him of a Cornish china-clay village, with its "rawness and rudeness, the Philistine newness of houses and shops". The local bookshop displayed nothing by "the man whose genius made the place glow in the imagination". Suburbia was equally dreadful. It was "shiftless, tasteless, characterless, trivial, wasting money on the pointless, the hideous – the inhabitants of the fuck-hutches in millions don't know what to do to spend it."

Rowse had a Gibbonian eye for detail. Between the wars he noticed lamplighters at work in Cornwall. He commented on the prevalence of spitting in Dublin. He observed that Golders Green Crematorium had separate lavatories for "gentlemen" and "undertakers". He spotted a Cornish woman wearing a badge saying "Worthy of the Lamb". He discovered that French-Canadian priests would not absolve men who confessed to using contraceptives unless they performed a "complete act" – "emission before remission". He descried black hairs on the lobes of Father D'Arcy's ears.

But none of this makes him a Pepys or Boswell, whose cinematic immediacy he could never match. His love affair with Adam von Trott, for example, however throbbing in the flesh, is anaemic in print. Rowse cannot compete with Creevey or Greville, whose malice was more feline and gossip less trivial. Who cares that Warden Pember of All Souls said that Denis Dannreuther was of Jewish extraction, but that the extraction was complete? Rowse was, indeed, a more peripheral figure even than "Chips" Channon or Alan Clark, both compelling chroniclers. He became the club bore, harrumphing that Malcolm Muggeridge was a cad who deserved to be horse-whipped for criticising the Queen.

Part of the problem with Rowse, insofar as one can tell from this idiosyncratic and bowdlerised selection of his journals (which omits important matters covered in Ollard's biography), is that he would indulge in diatribes. His diary is often more a repository of spleen than a record of experience. Take his comments on America. It was a frequent destination since he was better paid and regarded there than at home, yet he abominated its Puritan respectability: "everything seen in terms of ethics, moralising, cant, humbug". Sometimes he sympathised with George III.

More important, Rowse was too much of a solipsist to make a satisfactory diarist. He was so bound up in himself and his work that he lacked empathy. He relished narcissistic "self-communion". All Souls was his sanctum and he seemed best suited to the seclusion of a monastic (his enemies said a padded) cell. He spent so much time amid archives that he described himself as "a Museum specimen".

Finally, there is reason to doubt Rowse's veracity. He said himself, vis-à-vis Taylor, that not caring about the truth is "the ultimate sin for a historian". But the blurb warns that a friend, after glancing at the diary, found Rowse "quite erroneously" attributing a story to him that he had not told. Others caught him out in lies.

I had an experience of Rowse's deceit when, in 1974, I sent him a letter asking where he had published an obscure article about the eccentric poet and parson of Morwenstow, Robert Stephen Hawker, whose biography I was writing. Rowse hospitably invited me to lunch. We had an amusing talk, though I rejected his animadversions on the "filthy miners" and his suggestion that I should become his secretary. (If I accepted the position, he explained, he would have to get to know me very intimately indeed; when I told this story at a Private Eye lunch two people, one male and one female, said they had received the same proposal.) However, Rowse professed to have forgotten the location of the article. Eventually, I tracked it down in an academic journal but was surprised when, soon after, it reappeared as a separate publication between hard covers.

So Rowse's diary may well contain as much apocrypha as revelation.

Piers Brendon's 'The Dark Valley' is published by Pimlico