Rowse was born at St. Austell, Cornwall, and died there. Son of a china-clay worker, he was the first in Cornwall to gain a university scholarship and in 1921, at the age of 17, he went to Christ Church, Oxford. He went up to Oxford to read English but he was soon persuaded to pursue history. At age 23 he was elected a fellow of All Souls, Oxford.

Rowse wrote many works on English history including Tudor Cornwall (1941), The Use of History (1946), The England of Elizabeth (1950). He has also written some poetry, much of it on Cornwall, many literary works, including A Cornish Childhood (1942), several books on aspects of Shakespeare, a life of Marlowe (1964), and his own autobiography A Cornishman at Oxford (1965). He also wrote Homosexuals in History, (Barnes & Noble, 1977) from which we have extracted the delightful biography of Sergei Diaghilev.

Rowse was somewhat coy about his private life. He was friend of such ambivalent Oxonians as Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood and stephen Spender. He formed a close attachment to a young German aristocrat, Adam von Trott, described by Rowse as "six feet five tall" and "well aware of his shattering beauty", but "fundamentally heterosexual".

In a volume of his autobiography, Rowse confessed that for him "this was an ideal love-affair, platonic in the philosophic sense: we never exchanged a kiss, let alone embrace. We were both extremely high-minded, perhaps too much so". Rowse helped von Trott earn a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, and the two remained friends until von Trott was killed fighting in the anti-Nazi Resistence.