The amazon reviews kerfuffle

Orlando Figes was clearly an idiot not to admit he’d written the ‘malicious’ reviews himself, and to make blustering threats of lawsuits, but Friday’s Guardian piece by Robert Service is so wretchedly written and silly that I suspect Figes’ reviews may have been not so much malicious as perfectly accurate. Instead of spending his week eating sea bass and running on Walthamstow marshes and going to a concert where a piece by his wife’s grandfather was played and getting stuck in a traffic jam and worrying about not getting on with his next book and being altogether unsure ‘whether I could stand the tension any longer’, Service should simply have challenged Figes to a duel. Pistols at dawn, outside the Amazon warehouse.