Ugh. I don't know, the title promised a whole lot more than the book delivered. Even Kirkus Reviews failed me here. This is a story about British academia and how they were blindsided by a fraudulent parson/student/professor/researcher...take your pick. I imagine that if I was more familiar with the structure of British academia it might make more sense, but really what I saw was a systematic failure of an insulated group of academics to deal with this wackadoodle character, who keeps popping up using variations on the same deceptions he has employed in the past. The writing was fine, but the story just held very little interest after the first couple of chapters. A well written tale but of a mediocre series of events and a mediocre criminal. Sorry, but not recommended. ( )

A hugely entertaining biography of a con man. Often very funny, rather tragic and always fascinating because of the subject’s unusual psychology. Robert Parkin Peters’s jaw-dropping, life-long series of bigamous marriages and impostures as a clergyman and professor. There was obviously something seriously wrong with the guy and a lot of the pleasure in reading about him is trying to work out what it was. He displayed what appear to be psychopathic traits. Sisman suggests Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which seems sensible to me. A pathological desire for social status.

It strikes me that it’s not the status he wanted, but rather the attaining of it. He appears to have picked the three institutions – marriage, academia, and the cloth – where being who you claim to be is of fundamental importance. He’s doing the three things where discovery leads to immediate failure, allowing him the opportunity to relive the attainment of status again. Several times he achieved safe status only to throw it away with yet another easily discoverable evil plan.

It’s also noteworthy that all three of his interests were heavily reliant on ritual. He doesn’t seem to have enjoyed having wives, yet he repeatedly performed the courtship and marriage rituals. He seems to have had the ability to appear normal for short periods, during courtship, during job interviews, during services. Always in ritualised settings. It was his behaviour afterwards that ultimately gave him away, if his fraud wasn’t discovered first. He doesn’t appear to have understood people, nor cared to, and his engagement with ritualised behaviour may well be the only way he could interact with human beings. He may technically have been physically disabled, but his only true disability was social. ( )

Funny book about an audacious fraudster. ( )

I’ve been on a streak of books that don’t really hook me until around page 100, and this was no exception. Starts off a bit slowly, but becomes an amusing read with some surprising cameos from church historians of note (including one that I *really* wasn’t expecting, an old Yale professor of mine...).

In short, it’s the story of a sad and really quite terrible fellow who literally made a career out of tricking his way into a series of academic and ecclesiastical posts. It wouldn’t have been quite so amusing, I’m sure, if not for the deadpan storytelling, including that of historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (the author’s original research subject). A couple quotes that made me laugh out loud:

After running up a shocking bill at a Cambridge bookshop: “Some years later [...] Peters found himself seated next to the manager of Bowes and Bowes, who had not forgotten the gigantic bill. Peters extracted himself from this difficulty with a plea of non compos mentis, arguing that no sane person would have run up such an account.”

Trevor-Roper: “Could we not let [Peters] nestle for a time in some cosy clerical chair—not at Oxford, of course [...] but in some solemn, high-minded institution whose subsequent loss of face we can bear with equanimity? I have no doubt that he will give lectures which will be no less stimulating, and perhaps no more erroneous, than many you and I have heard and safely forgotten [...] Altogether, the appointment will add to the gaiety of nations, and who will suffer?”
( )

What an extraordinary story! My knowledge of Hugh Trevor-Roper was as author of a biography of Archbishop William Laud (which took me decades to finish), discredited in his old age by fake Hitler diaries. This book shows how dogged Trevor-Roper was when he came across the fraud and imposter, Robert Michael Parkins, aka Robert Parkins Peters, regarding him as both a menace and yet fascinating. The early life of Parkins/Peters probably explains his profligate romps round the world as an adult, the frustration of the book that, other than Parkins/Peters' own highly unreliable comments, there is no information. ( )