Breaking off from reading of the various villainies of one world-famous master of mendacity, I turned my attention to a gripping study of a lesser-known but equally compulsive liar whose activities proved to be every bit as astonishing.

My first reference is to Maxwell: The Final Verdict, Tom Bower’s 1995 biography of the fat fraud Robert Maxwell, which I picked up for a song at a charity shop.

My second is to a new book, The Professor & the Parson (Profile Books, £12.99), in which Adam Sisman details the offences and pretences of a bogus cleric and academic, multiple bigamist and occasional jailbird called Robert Parkin Peters, or for variation Robert Parkins, in fact his real name. The book had been receiving excellent reviews, prompting me to rush off and buy a copy.

It is not my intention today to go into Peters’s various malpractices, some of which were shamelessly pulled off in Oxford and its surroundings, and others across the world. The trail is a confusing one and best revealed through the detective work of Mr Sisman, who supplies a useful chronology at the end of his book.

I will observe, though, that his outrageous behaviour provokes as much admiration as condemnation given that – unlike Maxwell, say – his pretences were more in his pursuit of status than from any desire to enrich himself.

It is hard not to agree with Prof Charles R. Boxer, of Yale University, who said: “There is something rather engaging about the way in which he pursues his career of fraud and deceit without the slightest regard for occasional setbacks.”

The fascination was certainly felt by Hugh Trevor-Roper, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford and a “connoisseur of fraud”, in the words of Mr Sisman, his biographer. In the exposure of it, however, he was not always successful, notoriously in the case of the so-called ‘Hitler diaries’, his authentication of which for the Sunday Times was a permanent blight on his career.

Trevor-Roper had the measure of Peters, though, when he turned up in his rooms at Christ Church, claiming he was being persecuted by the Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Rev Harry Carpenter, “in the most unaccountable manner”.

On investigation, it proved that Peters was up to what soon proved to be his old tricks, having conned his way into a B Litt. course at Magdalen College using false documents. He had also attracted complaints from Miss Anne Dreydell (a woman I was later to know), the Principal of St Clare’s Hall, Oxford, where he had been teaching. Their nature is not known, but can be guessed at, given that St Clare’s was a finishing school for young ladies and that young ladies were a breed mightily admired by Peters. His success with women, given his unglamorous appearance, is surprising.

Trevor-Roper’s having ‘rumbled’ Peters, he opened a file on him, Sisman’s discovery of which, during research on his biography, eventually led to his own investigation. It may be noted here that its incompleteness, which Sisman acknowledges, can be explained in part by the refusal of Lambeth Palace to release its files on the bogus cleric.

I noted with interest that Martyn Percy, at present being challenged over his role as Dean of Christ Church, figures in the Peters story. As a scholar at Tyndale House, in Cambridge, he asked Peters why he was not in Crockford’s Clerical Directory, which lists all church appointments. His reply was “feeble obfuscation”.

Percy’s current difficulties at Christ Church reflect something of the conflict between academic and religious interests that have long featured at this unique institution.

Reading The Professor & the Parson lured me back to Sisman’s excellent Trevor-Roper biography of 2010 wherein I was reminded that he was fully involved in the plotting there. With fellow historians Charles Stuart and Robert Blake (see right) he formed the self-styled ‘Christ Church Mafia’. “[They] intrigued to insert their allies on to every college committee and to banish their enemies. ‘Whom can I ruin next?’ Hugh asked as he paced Tom Quad.”

Trevor-Roper’s anti-religious stance caused much trouble with Roman Catholics, including Evelyn Waugh. I wonder if it was known to the great composer Francis Poulenc, a deeply religious man, who played at T-R’s home in St Aldates, together with Dmitri Shostakovich, when both were in Oxford to receive honorary degrees.

To end where I began, with Robert Maxwell, it is curious to note that as a 22-year-old officer at the close of the war, he interrogated the very German, one Major Willi Johannmeyer, who was later to give up his copy of Hitler’s will to Trevor-Roper – and posterity.

Fifteen years later, Maxwell asked T-R in Oxford: “How did you manage to get that German to talk?” He was amazed to find it was not by bullying or bribery, which were, of course, his stock in trade.