The professor, his wife, and the secret, savage book reviews on Amazon
A top historian has revealed who rubbished rivals' works in online postings

Caroline Davies, guardian.co.uk, Sunday 18 April 2010

An extraordinary literary "whodunnit" over the identity of a mystery reviewer who savaged works by some of Britain's leading academics on the Amazon website has culminated in a top historian admitting that the culprit was, in fact, his wife.

Prof Orlando Figes, 50, an expert on Russia and professor of history at Birkbeck College, London, made the startling revelation in a statement through lawyers following a week of intrigue, suspicion, legal threats and angry email exchanges over postings on the website's UK book review pages.
 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."
Nor were Russian experts the only ones targeted.

In 2008 Figes, the Cambridge double-starred first and award-winning son of the feminist writer Eva Figes, lost out on the prestigious and lucrative £30,000 Samuel Johnson prize to Kate Summerscale's book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.
"Oh dear, what on earth were the judges thinking," wrote Historian. "The book is not nearly as good as its many plaudits in the press and book prize judges think."

Tracing back "Historian's" entries, Polonsky's suspicions were raised.
Memories of an earlier spat with Figes, following her own highly critical review in the Times Literary Supplement of his 2002 book Natasha's Dance, came to mind.
She drew the anonymous "Historian" reviews to the attention of Service, who in turn alerted more than 30 leading historians in Britain and abroad in a furious email.
In it, Service condemned the online reviews as "unpleasant personal attacks in the old Soviet fashion", adding: "Gorbachev banned anonimki from being used in the USSR as a way of tearing up someone's reputation. Now the grubby practice has sprouted up here."

Though, having been alerted to the problem, Amazon had by now removed the offending reviews, Service continued: "How to expunge the practice and expose the practitioners of malign electronic denunication in countries of free expression is, I think, a matter for debate." He attached scanned pages from the Amazon site.
Read the full intriguing story at The Guardian online.