After writing about Hitler, the Hapsburgs and other great historical topics, Hugh Trevor-Roper descends to the footnotes of history with his life of Sir Edmund Backhouse (18731944). But footnotes can be fascinating, and these are.

Scion of an English banking family (Barclay's Bank), Backhouse left Oxford in 1895 without a degree and remarkably in debt. He turned up, after an interval of wandering, in

China, where he spent most of the rest of his life, sustained by regular remittances from his family....

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There he learnt Chinese, translated, collaborated on a successful book. about the dowager empress. Ostensibly he was a scholar, a bit of a re cluse, a collector of books and manuscripts. At one time, as a result of his gift of his collection to Oxford, there was talk of a professorship for him there. But nothing came of it There was something a little doubtful about this benefactor.

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Trevor-Roper became involved in 1973, long after Backhouse's death; when he was consulted about the manuscript of the Backhouse memoirs, now in the hands of a Swiss scientist and hitherto unknown.

What Trevor-Roper discovered makes an amazing story. For Backhouse was not just a retiring scholar. He was also a talented and prolific forger, most notably of a Chinese diary used in his book as historical evidence. Moreover, he was an ingenious though not invariably suc cessful swindler.

No surprise, therefore, that he was a colossal liar, too, especially about himself. His memoirs appear to be more fiction than fact. And in his old age his mind dwelt obsessively on sex (chiefly homosexual) and his imagination ran obscenely riot.

Trevor-Roper's account, done with due consideration for suspense as well as with the historian's' careful attention to fact, is readable almost at a gulp.

Don A. Keister is a professoremeritus of English at the University of Akron.