With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Is academic snobbery to blame in the Figes affair?

[Jonathan Jones writes on art for the Guardian and is on the jury for the 2009 Turner prize]

Someone has to put in a good word for the historian Orlando Figes in the affair of the Amazon comments, and it may as well be me. As Tacitus wrote long ago, I am free from the usual pressures to be biased.

I have no connections with university departments, nor have I met any of the feuding scholars. I am, however, their target audience: a general reader who has found a great deal to admire in the works of Figes, especially his history of the Russian revolution, A People's Tragedy....

I have a horrible feeling that behind this disaster lies a rebirth of insular academic snobbery, the resentment of a popular historian. I find myself thinking of the episode of Peep Show in which an academic urges Mark Corrigan to write an attack on Simon Schama – "and his interesting, accessible books".
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)