Amazon: the scandal that gripped academe

It's nor unknown for writers to use pseudonyms to post glowing "customer reviews" of their own hooks on Amazon, said Jack Bremer on The First Post. But thanks to the recent scandal involving bestselling historian Orlando Figes and his wife, we have learned of another dodgy practice in the book world. The story began when writer Rachel Polonsky went online to see how her book on Russian history, Molotov's Magic Lantern, was doing. Her press reviews had been very good - hut on Amazon, there was one that stood out for its brutality. "This is the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published," opined the reviewer, using the name "Historian". Intrigued, Polonsky looked for other reviews by Historian (also known as "orlando-birkbeck"), and found she wasn't the only big-name Russianist who'd come under attack: Historian had dismissed Robert Service's books as "awful". Yet there was one unusually fawning review: a book named The Whisperers was deemed "beautiful and necessary... a gift to us all". That book was by Orlando Figes.
Could "Historian" possibly be Figes himself, Polonsky wondered. She had, it was true, given one of his books a pasting a few years earlier. And it was a strange coincidence that one of Historian's most scathing reviews had been for The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, the Kate


Summcrsealc thriller that had won a prize for which Figes had been shortlisted ("Oh dear, what were the judges thinking?"). But when rumours of Figes's involvement were reported, and dismissed as "implausible", in The Times Literary Supplement, Figes went ballistic. He called in his lawyers, who demanded damages from the TLS and also threatened Service for mentioning his concerns to other academics. Virtually anyone, said Figes, could have written those reviews, possibly to discredit him.
Trouble was, it wasn't just anyone, said Sam Leith in the London Evening Standard. Last week, the malicious reviewer unmasked herself as Dr Stephanie Palmer, an academic lawyer at Cambridge University - and Figes's wife. The pair say she only confessed to her husband after he began spraying around legal threats to stop the rumours - which seems plausible, given the "horse's arse" he had made of himself by adopting such a heavy-handed approach. It has all been very humiliating for Figes, said Robert Verkaik in The Independent. But the alternative - his wife's exposure during a libel suit - would have been worse. People who hide behind anonymous profiles online assume they are beyond reach, but sites such as Amazon can be forced to reveal their identities. Contrary to myth, the internet is not a lawless jungle.