Word: hermited
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With a success greater than any Backhouse could claim in the Imperial court, Trevor-Roper penetrates the mystery of the self-styled Hermit of Peking. But what is so fascinating about this book, what makes it so immensely readable, is not merely the catalogue of Backhouse's many frauds, of which the fabrication of Ching-Shan's diary is not even the greatest, but Trevor-Ropor's personal involvement in the story...
...away from the problem rather than face it. But instead Trevor-Roper plunged deeper into the mystery and emerged with a biography of Backhouse based neither on what others have said about him nor on Backhouse's own exaggerated recollections of his life, but of some substance in between. Hermit of Peking is the clever story of a clever man, cleverly constructed. It is a story worthy, one might say, of Backhouse himself...
...quotes Backhouse as insisting that, when he found the diary in an abandoned house during the post-Boxer looting, no one else was around. So, in Backhouse's "negotiations" with the Chinese government in the name of the shipbuilding firm John Brown and Co., Trevor-Roper finds that the hermit was the sole negotiator. So the British foreign minister, waiting for the shipment of arms from Shanghai to Hong Kong, hundreds of thousands of guns to aid in the war effort, suddenly realizes that no one has ever seen these guns except Backhouse, his secret agent...
...long as Trevor-Roper remains within the realm of these Backhousian mysteries, his truth about the method to the madness of the hermit of Peking rings true. In this context, the author's contention that Backhouse spent his life imaginatively substituting himself for those who were intimate with Verlaine, Lord Rosebery, the Empress Dowager, and other sources of power, is convincing...
...soon as Trevor-Roper tries to re-emerge from art into history, his facts take on the air of fantasy. And because Trevor-Roper has not offered enough objective evidence about Backhouse's career (he paraphrases the hermit much more often than he actually quotes him), the reader cannot fully believe the author. Thus Trevor-Roper's attempt to explain Backhouse's turn toward Germany in the '40's as an illustration of fin desiecle elitism of the British upper class converting into fascism, is simply a poor fit. It is like trying to find a practical...