Orlando Figes

For years, someone has been “savaging” the works of Britain’s leading academic historians in nasty but learned reader reviews on Amazon.co.uk. In fact, only one of the country’s most famous historians — Orlando Figes — seems to have escaped unscathed. Now, after a dramatic “week of intrigue, suspicion, legal threats and angry email exchanges over postings on the website’s UK book review pages,” an “extraordinary literary ‘whodunnit'” has concluded with the revelation of the identity of the author of the reviews: Figes’ wife, Dr. Stephanie Palmer.

A Guardian report by Caroline Davies lays out the core details:

The spat began last week when the Cambridge-based academic, Dr Rachel Polonsky, noticed among the many favourable reviews of her book on Russian culture, Molotov’s Magic Lantern, one condemning her efforts as “dense”, “pretentious” and “the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published”.

It ended on late on Friday evening with the surprise unveiling of Figes’s wife, Dr Stephanie Palmer, a senior law lecturer at Cambridge University, barrister, and member of the top human rights specialists, Blackstone Chambers, as the reviewer calling herself “Historian”, and responsible for several anonymous online attacks on the works of her husband’s rivals.

Indeed, “Historian”, who it transpired also generated a profile on the Amazon website under the username “Orlando-Birkbeck”, had not only rubbished Polonsky’s book, but also other works going back years and including books by Oxford University’s Robert Service, biographer of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. The book on Trotsky was a “dull read”, that on Stalin “disappointing” and his history of communism derided as “rubbish” and “an awful book”.

By contrast, Figes’s 2008 work, The Whisperer, was, according to Historian, a “beautiful and necessary” account of the Soviet system, penned by a man possessed of “superb story-telling skills” with this eulogy ending with the fervent wish: “I hope he writes for ever.”

Polonsky became suspicious when she remembered “an earlier spat with Figes, following her own highly critical review in the Times Literary Supplement of his 2002 book Natasha’s Dance.” She then contacted Service, “who in turn alerted more than 30 leading historians in Britain and abroad in a furious email,” in which he called the reviews “unpleasant personal attacks in the old Soviet fashion.” The Guardian also reports that Service and company somehow convinced Amazon to remove the reviews.

Stephanie Palmer

Meanwhile, although the Guardian does not detail why no one went immediately to Figes upon the revelation of the “Orlando-Birkbeck” profile, Figes was on the list of recipients of Service’s mass email and, although he was not accused directly in the email, he immediately “went on the offensive … responding to all the email’s recipients to protest he was not responsible for the unflattering reviews, which could have been written ‘by virtually anyone’.”

The next day — last Friday — Figes wrote another email, observing of the Orlando-Birkbeck profile, “Clearly, that would have been the very last nickname I would have chosen.” His attorney, meanwhile — and the article does not make clear why his attorney comes into play, as Figes had apparently been accused of nothing so far — also issued a statement “stressing the mystery reviewer could, in fact, be a way of discrediting Figes himself.”

According to a report in The Independent, Figes’s lawyer also “contacted Professor Service, threatening that, in the event of libel proceedings, he, Service, would be liable.” Figes’ attorney also contacted the Times Literary Supplement, accusing “the TLS of defamation for first raising the issue.”

Later that day, Friday evening, Figes’ attorney issued a new statement: “My client’s wife wrote the reviews. My client has only just found out about this, this evening. Both he and his wife are taking steps to make the position clear.”

Neither Figes or Palmer have been heard from since. Nor have Service, Polonsky, et al issued comment. Only TLS editor Peter Stothard has had anything to say: “When academics start using the same techniques as John Terry or other celebrities to try and kill legitimate press comment on issues of general importance, the intellectual life of this country is seriously compromised.”