KWQ q.3

[dubdobdee]

3.
i. who ‘discovered’ Vortigern?
ii. which Old Borstalian was unmasked by Oberhuber?
iii. which epistle, allegedly from Grigori, helped Stanley to defeat Ramsay?
iv. who created documents covering an 11-year period, supposedly found in a hayloft in the DDR?
v. who produced a group of physicians to prove his innocence, but laid himself open to alternative charges?
vi. who was able, through his own work, to convince experts that the painter Martini was also a sculptor?
vii. which self-styled Japanese heathen described an island where broiled serpents were a favourite dish?
viii. in what was the mandible of pygmaeus equipped with the dentition of troglodytes?
ix. who palmed off depictions of a Brighton suburb, but later owned up?
x. who provided Lübeck with an anachronistic fowl?

rules:
a: give nice full answers and anecdotes!
b: say if googled or not
c: you're obviously allowed to look ahead and future questions as (first) this was published in a national newspaper and i can't stop you and (second) i can't stop me either, and have done just this

*i know the theme i think, and also iii., iv., and viii. (w/o googlin yet)

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i. "Vortigern and Rowena is a famous theatrical hoax perpetrated by William Henry Ireland, a notorious forger of Shakespearean manuscripts. Ireland claimed to have found a lost play of Shakespeare entitled Vortigern and Rowena, which was initially accepted by the literary community — albeit not on sight — as genuine. The play was eventually presented at Drury Lane on 2 April 1796, to immediate ridicule."

ii. "Eric Hebborn was born to a Cockney family in 1934... At the age of eight, he states in his autobiography that he set fire to his school and was sent to Borstal reformatory, although his sister Rosemary disputes this... [H]e became part of the international art scene and formed acquaintances with many artists and art historians, including the British spy, Sir Anthony Blunt in 1960, who told Hebborn that a couple of his drawings looked like Poussins. This sowed the seeds of his forgery career... When contemporary critics did not seem to appreciate his own paintings, Hebborn began to copy the style of old masters such as; Corot, Castiglione, Mantegna, Van Dyck, Poussin, Ghisi, Tiepolo, Rubens, Jan Breughel and Piranesi... In 1978 a curator at the National Gallery of Artin Washington DC , Conrad Oberhuber... noticed that two drawings had been executed on the same kind of paper... [but] waited a full 18 months before revealing the deception to the media, and, even then never mentioned Hebborn's name, for fear of a libel suit"


iii. "The Zinoviev Letter is thought to have been instrumental in [Stanley Baldwin's] Conservative Party's victory in the United Kingdom general election, 1924, which ended the country's first Labour government... The letter was allegedly addressed from Grigori Zinoviev, president of the presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (Comintern), and Arthur MacManus, the British representative on the presidium, to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain... Published in the conservative British Daily Mail newspaper four days before the election, the letter came at a sensitive time also in relations between Britain and the Soviet Union, owing to Conservative opposition to the forthcoming parliamentary ratification of the Anglo-Soviet trade agreement of August 8...British Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald's attempts to cast doubt on the letter's authenticity were hampered by its widespread acceptance among government officials. MacDonald "felt like a man sewn in a sack and thrown into the sea", he told his Cabinet on October 31 as they prepared to leave office."

Iv. "In April 1983, the German news magazine Stern published extracts from what purported to be the diaries of Adolf Hitler, known as the Hitler Diaries, which were subsequently exposed as forgeries... Journalist Gerd Heidemann claimed to have discovered them, and submitted them to be reviewed by a number of experts in World War II history, notably the historians Hugh Trevor-Roper, Eberhard Jäckel and Gerhard Weinberg. At a press conference on April 25, 1983, the diaries were declared by these experts to be authentic... The diaries were actually written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger of Hitler's works. Both he and Heidemann went to trial in 1985 and were each sentenced to 42 months in prison."

v. [???]