C. E. Bechhofer Roberts

Carl Eric Bechhofer Roberts (1894–1949) was a British author and journalist.

Roberts was born and raised in London but relocated to Germany to study classics. He worked as a professional writer, producing works on travel, biography, criminology, fiction, paranormal, translation and drama. He contributed to The New Age magazine.

Roberts met Gurdjieff in Tiflis in 1919. His book Denikin's Russia and the Caucasus, 1919-1920 (1921) contained the first description of Gurdjieff published in English.

His 1928 novel This Side Idolatry (by the pseudonym "Ephesian") was the first public presentation of the relationship between Charles Dickens and the actress Ellen Ternan.

Roberts books were recommended by George Orwell.

Roberts took interest in psychical research and spiritualism but approached these subjects from mostly a skeptical position. In his book The Truth about Spiritualism (1932) he came to the conclusion that there is no evidence for the spirit hypothesis in mediumship. According to the research of Roberts all séance and spiritualist phenomena can be explained by "telepathy, self-deception, fraud or neurosis".

Roberts was convinced that the medium Helen Duncan was a fraud and wrote a foreword to the book The Trial of Mrs. Duncan (1945) by Helena Normanton.

Fiction

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