He spent his junior year abroad at the University of Nottingham and returned there in 1975 to begin work on a PhD with Roger Poole.
[2] He was tutor in English at Nottingham before moving to London in 1977, where he co-founded the literary review Books & Issues with Aidan Coen.
In 1985 he joined John Slater and David Starkey as a director of the independent television production company Mirageland.
At Mirageland Trombley produced The Prince of Wales' ITV television special on community architecture, The Pride Factor.
In addition to producing several documentaries at Mirageland, he also devised and wrote the young people's ITV network series Professor Lobster, and two seasons of Erasmus Microman.
With Bruce Eadie as producer and co-writer, and Peter Miller as film editor, Trombley directed many documentary films of note including The Execution Protocol (1992), of which Vincent Canby of The New York Times said it "is not easy to sit through, but it touches nerves that force a rethinking of essential values.
Drancy: A Concentration Camp in Paris 1941-1944 (1994) explored the mechanisms of French collaboration in the Holocaust; Le Monde wrote [2] "the striking clarity of tone and hard-hitting evidence are blood chilling."
In 1997 Worldview produced the eight-part television series War & Civilization based on the lifetime's work of military historian John Keegan, and narrated by Walter Cronkite.
While working as deputy editor of the RIBA Journal he edited, with Peter Murray, the guidebook Modern British Architecture since 1945 (1984).
In 2012 Atlantic Books published Fifty Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern World, and A Short History of Western Thought.
In 2008 Trombley and Jay Kerr cowrote the musical entertainment "Adirondack Awakening", to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's and Samuel de Champlain's exploration of that region.
In 2013, Trombley and Koller composed the musical 1961, which looks at peace and prosperity in the fictional town of Pleasantville, US, in the years between the Korean and Vietnam wars.