Telling Tales: A History of Literary Hoaxes
By Melissa Katsoulis
Constable £8.99, 336 pages
FT Bookshop price: £7.19

Katsoulis’s compelling compendium of con artists opens with 18th-century trickster William Lauder, a bitter, failed writer who set out to ruin the reputation of John Milton by fabricating evidence that he was a plagiarist.

Some deceptions inTelling Tales are less straightforward. Binjamin Wilkomirski provoked fury with his false Holocaust memoir, Fragments, in 1995. In fact, he (real name Bruno Grosjean; not Jewish) did have an abusive childhood – although not in concentration camps. What seems to be a despicable deception is explained as the workings of an “emotionally fragile man”.

Other purveyors of the literary hoax include James Frey, whose graphic account of addiction and rehab even fooled Oprah Winfrey; JT Leroy, the teenage boy prostitute who was actually a middle-aged woman; and Tom Carew, the SAS reject who reinvented himself as an SAS expert.