Professor of history at Birkbeck College, Orlando Figes, and the author of a Stalin book has named his wife as the author of the comments centred on other books by scholars that have been labelled dull and pretentious.
Figes first denied that he knew who the reviewer was that went by the title of ‘Historian’ that coincidently only wrote positive comments about Figes’ novels.
However, after many lawyers’ letters and emails from other historians he finally issued a statement admitting that his wife, a leading law lecturer at Cambridge University, Dr. Stephanie Palmer, was the author of the comments.
The hurtful comments has sent bitter waves across the normally cordial world of academics as fighting emails have been passed around via email to the best known academia writers.
The three writers that were targeted particularly by Palmer were Kate Summerscale the author of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, Prof Service a biographer of Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky, and Dr. Polonsky.
Dr. Polonsky was the first to raise questions about the comments when she noticed that a person by the name of ‘Historian’ had given her novel a harsh review on Amazon’s UK site when the average of all the other reviews averaged from 4.5 to 5.
The following week after he was attacked as the author of the reviews, Prof. Figes stated that did not have a part in the reviews and that anyone could have written them. He added that he does not have any ill will towards any of the writers but if he wanted to attack their writings he would have done so in the press so he could be paid for it.
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