Connoisseurs and conmen tells the untold story of John Hilditch, a man from an ordinary background who went to extraordinary lengths to become an art collector and connoisseur in early twentieth-century Britain. Born into a provincial working-class family, Hilditch went on to collect over sixty thousand Chinese treasures, many of which he acquired in thrilling escapades in China, or so at least he claimed. Hilditch played hard and fast with the truth in his struggle to become a cultural authority, a struggle that saw him go up against the nation's leading connoisseurs, and which spilled into the pages of papers up and down the country.

This book uses Hilditch's life as a lens through which to examine how cultural authority was constructed, asserted and forged in a period of drastic social, cultural and political change. Hilditch not only allows us to investigate how increased opportunities for social mobility and the democratisation of culture and politics allowed the lower classes to claim a stake in high culture and civic institutions, but in directly confronting the museum authorities he lets us examine how these changes impacted traditional social and cultural hierarchies. Through analysis of Hilditch's challenge to the cultural elites, Connoisseurs and conmen exposes the instability of the cultivated elite's authority, as well as the limits of democratisation.