After threatening colleagues, literary journals and newspapers with legal action last week, Orlando Figes has revealed this morning that it was not his wife who anonymously rubbished fellow historians in comments on Amazon: it was him.
In a statement released to the Daily Mail the professor of history at London’s Birkbeck College said that he takes “full responsibility” for what he called “foolish errors”….
UD thanks Dave for the link.
Background here.
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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
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April 23rd, 2010 at 9:36AM
Super tacky and juvenile. That is too bad. Figes has written some great books and his scholarship is first rate. Now he is just a petty minded bully.
April 23rd, 2010 at 2:44PM
Given the tone of the current controversy between Michel Onfrau and Elizabeth Roudinesco, I despair of the civilized academic debate.
April 23rd, 2010 at 6:33PM
I hadn’t heard about that one, DM. I’ll check it out. Thanks.
April 24th, 2010 at 12:52PM
Sorry, typo, Michel Onfray. Onfray is a French philosopher (whatever you put under that description) that writes somewhat popular books. He lately wrote an essay attacking Freud as a fraud. Psychoanalysis is popular in France among, for want of a better expression, intellectuals of the literary kind (humanities, psychology, philosophy). This essay was thus received with some hostility by some people, including Elizabeth Roudinesco, a historian of psychoanalysis. She wrote an angry opinion piece attacking Onfray, Onfray answered and so on…
The quarrel is at the level of alleging that Onfray uses arguments from the far-right (bad! evil!).
April 24th, 2010 at 1:37PM
Wouldn’t you have to dismiss almost all of continental philosophy if you were to condemn a scholar who used the work of a far-right thinker? Oh wait.
April 25th, 2010 at 9:31PM
[…] has already covered the curious tale of how Orlando Figes anonymously and viciously attacked rival historians’ […]
January 5th, 2011 at 2:37PM
[…] that historian’s anonymous Amazon comments, viciously trashing fellow historians’ books and voluminously praising his own, look rather […]