this is a pretty funny story: the guy's wife was killing his rivals on amazon; all are eminent british academics. now on the other hand robert service among others approaches the whole thing with extreme incomprehension.

Service...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."

dude. it's an amazon reader's review. of course the reviewer might be your rival's wife, or your mother-in-law, or whatever. you have to learn to read in the genre/medium you're in. amazon isn't the government, much less the soviet government. it isn't the times literary supplement. it's a website where more or less anyone can say more or less anything and try to disguise themselves, which has its own charm. ok then you try to ascertain the identity and you post that. it's a different mode of filtering. like the other, it's radically imperfect. but what the hell. i don't even think amazon should have taken the stuff down; i'd like to read it. like i say, just post more.

now on the other hand you'd have to say that this is a bush-league move by stephanie palmer (the wife) and - one would have to suspect - by orlando figes (the russian historian).