THE PROFESSOR AND THE PARSON

An astonishing story of decades of deception by a slithery English academic and cleric.

It was during his research for his 2010 biography of noted English scholar Hugh Trevor-Roper that Sisman (John le Carré, 2015, etc.) came across a dossier that Trevor-Roper had assembled on Robert Parkin Peters (born in 1918 as Robert Michael Parkins), who, from young manhood on, tried (and sometimes succeeded—though never for very long) to establish himself as an academic scholar and theologian. He had in fact been ordained, and he had obtained some degrees, but never the weighty ones he claimed at various times to have earned. He also married multiple times (at least seven), was imprisoned for bigamy and deported from the United States and Canada, made moves on about every woman who wandered into his orbit, and was exposed as a fraud in newspapers. Somehow, however, he slid along, moving from position to position. He lied, plagiarized, stole, and fled his debts, jumping from country to country. In the era before Google, it sometimes took employers a long time to learn the truth about him and fire him—or defrock him and otherwise attempt to clip his wings, which always grew back very quickly. Peters was a small, nondescript man—the photographs show him looking a little like Mister Peepers—but he was utterly convincing in his various guises. Trevor-Roper’s dossier ended abruptly in 1983 when he was humiliated by the Hitler diaries scandal (he had innocently authenticated the forgeries), and Sisman had to do some diligent digging on his own to unearth the rest of this jaw-dropping tale. The author speculates only modestly about why Peters behaved as he did, but he concludes that he was a classic narcissist. “Studying Peters,” writes Sisman, “is like tracking a particle in a cloud chamber: usually one cannot see the man himself, but only the path he left behind.” The appended chronology is also incredible.

A captivating true tale that makes even the most intricate con-artist movies look cartoonish.