Figes’ Dance
The Rachel Polonsky/Orlando Figes Spat, covered recently by The Literary Saloon, can be followed in part online on the TLS site. Polonsky’s review is wonderfully dismissive. Her well-researched comparisons of passages in Figes’ book Natasha’s Dance (a book about Russia, to quote Woody Allen after speed-reading War & Peace) with Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches, and others, is impressive and shocking.
Jason Cowley’s response in The Guardian is a classic case of a journalist relying on rhetoric rather than fact to gain the upper hand. He suggests that Polonsky is critical of Figes only because she is the type of academic “who prefer only to be constrained by the minutiae of facts and dry detail.” No names offered, no detail provided, just rumour and innuendo. This is the main reason why academics distrust journalists. Apparently Figes is in consultation with his lawyers. Stalin himself would be proud of his love of freedom of speech!
Other SpikeMagazine.com posts of interest:
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Orlando Figes reacted rather differently to T. J. Binyon’s hostile review of his book (’14 errors in one paragraph on Puskin’); but then the late Tim Binyon was a very big cheese in the field of Russian studies and Figes was therefore content to take a caning.