Author: Ophelia Benson

Poor Orlando Figes, what a terrible fate. The embarrassment of it.

The future of one of Britain’s leading historians was looking increasingly uncertain tonight after he admitted that he was the author of anonymous reviews that praised his own work as “fascinating” and “uplifting” while rubbishing that of his rivals.

On Amazon. Oh dear.

Orlando Figes, one of the stars of contemporary history, had issued a string of legal threats to academic colleagues, literary journals and newspapers that suggested he might have written the reviews posted on Amazon.co.uk.

When challenged about the reviews, Figes’s lawyer initially denied Figes was the author and threatened legal action. In a later statement, Figes blamed them on his wife, the barrister Stephanie Palmer.

Then he said he did it, and he’s fraffly sorry.

[T]he editor of the TLS, Peter Stothard, said the issue of poisonous online reviews needed to be kept in proportion. “There’s nothing new about oversensitive writers, and nothing new about anonymous criticism, both of which have existed since time immemorial. What is new and is regrettable is when historians use the law to stifle debate and to put something in the paper which is untrue.”…As a specialist in Russian history, Figes’s “whole business is replacing a mountain of lies with a few truths”.

It’s a good business, and people who engage in it should try to live up to it.

Anthony Grayling nails Terry Eagleton (who has written a new book pretending to say something about evil).

[H]e sets off on one of those complexifying journeys, like the route of a pinball bouncing backwards and forwards among a thicket of pingers, from William Golding to St Augustine, Macbeth to Pseudo-Dionysus, original sin to the Holocaust, Shakespeare to Freud, Satan to Thomas Mann, Arendt to Aristotle, and so copiously on – a verbal pinball ride among the entries in the telephone book of Western culture, to tell us what evil is. But do not expect, by the end, a conclusion, still less a definition, nor even a summary. Eagleton has been too long among the theorists to risk a straightforward statement. You have to grasp at fragments as you bounce among the pingers, not always quite sure whether he is agreeing or disagreeing with this or that author, even whether he is still paraphrasing an author or speaking with his own voice. That’s a technique, of course.

That’s the guy all right – copious name-dropping, energetic showing off by means of style and a bogus kind of erudition, and no actual argument at all. That last bit about not being able to tell if he is paraphrasing or speaking with his own voice applies exactly to Stanley Fish, too. The snail-trail of ‘Theory.’

As we are dealing with Eagleton here, note that this is of course not a mish-mash of inconsistencies, as it appears to be; this is subtlety and nuance. It is, you might say, nuance-sense.

It may not be clear if you haven’t read the whole review: that first claim is pure irony.

Eagleton has spent his life inside two mental boxes, Catholicism and Marxism, of both of which he is a severe internal critic – that is, he frequently kicks and scratches at the inside of the boxes, but does not leave them.

Now that’s a great line. Funny that Eagleton, for all his showing off, can’t write anything as good.

More Pitcher. He’s an embarrassment to the Anglican church and to the Telegraph (whether the Anglican church and the Telegraph know it or not) so let’s by all means rub it in.

He was so pleased with his stupid abusive self-admiring reply to Sholto Byrnes that he re-posted it on the Telegraph blog. Well all right then, that makes it worth ridiculing.

(I’m doing what I’m criticizing him for doing, of course, and I do it all the time. But 1) I’m not an Anglican vicar 2) I write more restrainedly when I write on other people’s sites and 3) I do it better than he does. Plus did I mention I’m not a vicar?)

He starts by alluding to “a more measured atmosphere than currently prevails on my own foam-flecked thread.” But the foam is his, yet he seems to be pretending that it’s other people’s. So: he’s sly, and devious, and a blame-shifter.

Then he calls people who criticize his extraordinarily abusive post about Evan Harris “attack puppies” then he wonders “how many of them actually read the piece before dutifully answering the Twitter-call.” As if no one would have criticized his extraordinarily abusive post had it not been tweeted. That’s wrong, I criticized it without having seen any tweets about it. But even more absurd is the implication that if people had read the piece they wouldn’t have criticized it, or not as harshly as they did. Nonsense. It was an extraordinarily abusive post – he said Evan Harris campaigns to euthanize terminally ill people. That’s both vicious and false.

Then there are four paragraphs of blustering “I never, and besides they did too,” fetching up at

As for the Lib-Dems’ attack-bunnies, if they consider that’s evil and vicious, then I’d hate them to be around if I was rude about someone

without having mentioned the abusive and dishonest claim that Harris campaigns to euthanize terminally ill people. What a disgusting man – abusive, cowardly, and unrepentant. That claim was evil and vicious, and his refusal to cop to it now is…enough to make you lose your lunch.

Then there’s a rant about how Christian he is, whatever people say.

Many of these people expressing outrage about my criticism of Harris would be the same people who criticise Christians for not being more robust and outspoken; I wish they’d make their minds up.

That’s a good illustration of how stupid he is. He doesn’t know what “these people” would say, so it’s imbecilic to wish they would make their minds up when he has no way of knowing that their minds aren’t made up. Of course it’s also rude, but that goes without saying by now.

Then there’s the sly nasty stuff about loving him but struggling to like him oh the hell with it he doesn’t like him. Cute. What is he, 12?

Then he flogs his book, then he closes, revoltingly, with “With every blessing.”

There is one ray of light though; David Colquhoun comments (May 9, 10:48 p.m.).

It is no wonder that Christianity is in decline. Attitudes like those of George Pitcher must be helping it in its way to oblivion rather effectively. I can’t recall reading any political diatribe that was quite so intolerant and hate-filled as his.

I am reminded of homeopaths, those lovely cuddly holistic people who, once the realise that there trade has been revealed as fraud, turn quite remarkably unpleasant.

There is some amusement to be derived from the fact that these groups of people, who are both adamantly opposed to science and to enlightenment values, spread there hate-filled messages via the internet, a product, ahem, of science and the enlightenment.

There’s for you, sir!