Conning the dons

In 2010, Adam Sisman published a masterly biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was not merely one of the best historians of his generation but also a former intelligence officer, fascinated by tricks, lies and fraud. He himself wrote a mischievous series of anonymous articles for The Spectator, purporting to emanate from the 17th-century pen of ‘Mercurius Oxoniensis’,which gave a hilarious picture of his contemporary dons at Oxford and their crazy ways. One of his funniest books was an exposé of the sinologist Sir Edmund Backhouse, a benefactor of the Bodleian Library, whom Trevor-Roper proved to have been a forger and liar on a heroic scale.

But perhaps the supreme irony of Trevor-Roper’s life was that, on behalf of the Sunday Times, he authenticated the ‘Hitler Diaries’ forged by Konrad Kujau: fascinated as he was by hoaxes, he fell for the greatest literary hoax of the 20th century. It was a humiliation which delighted his enemies, and it will always haunt his memory.