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Bezig met laden... The Hermit of Peking : The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse (origineel 1976; editie 1986)door Hugh R. Trevor-Roper
Informatie over het werkHermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse door Hugh Trevor-Roper (1976)
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. Backhouse, Sir Edmund (Subject) Trevor-Roper demolishes any remnant reputation that "master forger" Sir Edmund Backhouse might have retained. The author worked tirelessly to investigate the fantastic historical creations and the fraudulent business transactions that Backhouse perpetrated in China during his hermetic life in Peking. What ensues is an eviscerating exposure of an aesthetic exile from late Victorian England who brilliantly defrauded and confused others in a manic-depressive quest for respectability. In 1973, a distinguished Swiss physician handed to the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper an enameled Chinese case containing two previously unknown memoirs by Edmund Backhouse, to be delivered to the Bodleian Library at Oxford, which already housed thousands of Chinese books and manuscripts donated by Backhouse. Trevor-Roper knew of Backhouse as a former member of the British Secret Service and the co-author of books on the Empress Dowager and the imperial court of old Peking. Upon reading the newly discovered works, Trevor-Roper realized, to his surprise and dismay, that the memoirs ‘were of no ordinary obscenity.’ (They were published in 2011 as Decadence Mandchoue). Like A.J.A. Symons, whose discovery of the pornographic Venetian letters of Frederick Rolfe drove him on his Quest for Corvo, Trevor-Roper set out ‘to pursue the elusive and preposterous personality’ of Backhouse. The story he tells in Hermit of Peking is stranger than fiction. Sinologist, secret agent, arms broker, envoy of the American Bank Note Company and the shipbuilder John Brown & Company, and by his own account confidant of court eunuchs and erotic playmate of the Empress Dowager—Backhouse lived a life scarcely to be believed. But the truth is not really the object here, by my lights. Trevor-Roper paints Backhouse as a master fabulist, and himself as the authoritative debunker, but any man who like Backhouse makes of his very flesh a great poem (and of his life a randy memoir) is to be commended. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Onderdeel van de uitgeversreeks(en)Die Andere Bibliothek (291) Erelijsten
The story of one of the most outrageous confidence tricksters of the twentieth century, Sir Edmund Blackhouse. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)951.007History and Geography Asia China and region HistoryLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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