Volume 35, Number 9 · June 2, 1988
His Brilliant Career
By Hugh Trevor-Roper
The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln
by Bernard Wasserstein
Yale University Press, 327 pp., $27.50
It sometimes happens, when we are engaged in some grave research, that some marginal figure coming in from outside, irrelevant to our purpose, so commands our attention that we are obliged to suspend our serious studies in order to exorcise him. This happened to me some years ago when the strange figure of Sir Edmund Backhouse intruded into my life and would not go away until I had written a book about him. Now Mr. Bernard Wasserstein, a distinguished modern historian, has suffered a similar intrusion. He has been diverted from his graver studies by a somewhat similar character: Ignácz Trebitsch, alias Ignatius Trebitsch Lincoln, sometime M.P. for Darlington, alias the abbot Chao Kung of Shanghai.
Review, 4217 words
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