The trail of discovery began when Hugh Trevor-Roper received the memoirs of Sir Edmund Backhouse, the celebrated Chinese scholar, in somewhat unusual circumstances. They described a very different person from the one who had apparently lived such a respectable life until his death in 1944. In them, Backhouse claimed that he had been intimate with characters as diverse as Verlaine and Lord Roseberry, and that his many lovers (of both sexes) had included the Dowager Empress of China. It gradually became clear that the detailed, plausible and obscene memoirs were a work of fantasy – yet a fantasy interwoven with detailed fact. Intruigued, Hugh Trevor-Roper set out to discover as much as he could about Sir Edmund Backhouse, and unearthed the story of one the most outrageous confidence tricksters of the century.
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Hugh Trevor Roper, later Lord Dacre of Glanton, was born in Northumberland and educated at Charterhouse and Christ Church, Oxford, where he read classics and modern history. He served in the Secret Intelligence Service during the second world war, and was later sent by the British Government to write The Last Days of Hitler, documenting Hitler’s death. In 1957 he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Christ Church, Oxford, and in 1980 became Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He died in 2003 at the age of 89.
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