Word: roper
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...book actually begins in 1973 when Trevor Roper is asked to review Backhouse's memoirs to determine whether they would be a suitable addition to the collection of manuscripts which the scholar left to Oxford. These memoirs, which recount Backhouse's sexual encounters with some of the most prominent figures of his time, are so obscene, that Trevor-Roper, upon reading them, first had the characteristic Backhousian reaction of preferring to run 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...
...both the historian and the historian he is writing about prefer to assault the gloom head on, neglecting details and looking only for the general pattern that emerges. For Backhouse this meant creating new details each time he needed to give credence to an already created story. For Trevor-Roper this means emphasizing certain old details in order to give credence to a new story...
...frequently told tale of the discovery of the forged diary, Trevor-Roper 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...
BACKHOUSE EMERGES, in Trevor-Roper's vividly written portrait, as a man who hid himself from probing eyes and re-emerged with his own version of reality. Like the hot-house atmosphere in which it flourished, the main quality of that reality was its self-containment. Trevor-Roper returns to the world of Backhouse's memoris which offer the best prof...