Word: roper
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...working in Peking, to remove his name from the title page of the book. Bland, convinced that Backhouse's plea was just another example of his over-humility, refused. Bland was convinced his decision would be vindicated by history. Now, a recent biography of Backhouse, written by Hugh Trevor-Roper, the noted British historian, suggests it might have been better for both collaborators in the long run if history had lost...
...other social data. Still others explain old riddles by invoking the theories of sociology and psychoanalysis. New voices insist that it should serve the purposes of racial justice or economic reform. In contrast to all these divisions, Braudel offers historians a new kind of synthesis. Oxford Historian H.R. Trevor-Roper has written of the Braudelian method that it "is a kind of history which crosses all frontiers and uses all techniques. The achievement is to have drawn geography, sociology, law, ideas into the broad stream of history and thereby to have refreshed that stream, which previously had been running dangerously...
That ingredient can be found throughout Hermit of Peking, a model of historical detective work. The unfailingly literate sleuth is Hugh Trevor-Roper, author of The Last Days of Hitler and The Rise of Christian Europe, who has ventured far from his customary turf. In 1973, Trevor-Roper came upon two volumes of unpublished memoirs by Sir Edmund. The work appeared so outrageous, so incongruent with the accepted character of the author-it chronicled, in obscene detail, his amours with Chinese eunuchs and such European celebrities as Poet Paul Verlaine -that Trevor-Roper felt compelled to investigate the Backhouse background...
...Edmund's autobiography scarcely seemed an ironclad source, so Trevor-Roper conducted his hunt elsewhere: in dusty Foreign Office records, in letters now reposing in Toronto, in files of U.S. and British companies. The exposé searched for an aberrant scholar and turned up a consummate rogue. Trapped by bad debts, Backhouse had dropped out of Oxford. In 1898 he showed up in China with faked references; 15 years later he shipped the Bodleian some 17,000 volumes of chinoiserie; later he contributed 18 manuscripts that were blatant forgeries and promised other treasures that did not exist. During World...
...have found this trove of gossip and intelligence in its author's house during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. The diary became the jewel of the Oxford collection; scholars may have debated its authenticity, but hardly a soul dared suggest that Backhouse himself had written it. Now Trevor-Roper, revealing for the first time the backdrop of quiet scandals that made up Backhouse's life, concludes that the Sinologist was one of the greatest forgers of all time. His memoirs too were made of whole cloth, the lubricious dreams of a suppressed old Victorian...