I had always thought it was Henry Kissinger who said that academic politics were so intense because the stakes were so low. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations says this is a common misapprehension and that the real originator was the American political scientist Wallace Stanley Sayre. The quote attributed to Sayre is less pithy, so perhaps he came up with the idea and Mr Kissinger refined it. Who knows?
No one knew for sure who "Historian" was when he started rubbishing the books of rival historians on Amazon and praising the work of Orlando Figes , Russian specialist and history professor at Birkbeck College, London, although many suspected the reviewer was Prof Figes.
The tale took several turns, including Prof Figes threatening to sue his rivals and his wife claiming to be the author of the reviews, before he admitted that he had been the culprit all along.
Prof Figes was not a skilled coverer of his tracks. Rachel Polonsky, one of the authors whose books he had savaged, clicked on Historian’s online profile, which leapt straight to the nickname "orlando-birkbeck".
Nor was Prof Figes particularly original. In 2004, an Amazon software glitch disclosed the names behind anonymous reviewers, revealing authors doing exactly what Prof Figes has now admitted to.
The internet has upended many established social conventions, one of the oldest being that there was something cowardly about anonymous condemnations.
Another convention was the idea that everyone had something worthwhile to say. Everyone has a right to speak, of course, but the web has demonstrated that not everyone is worth listening to. Some online comment is cogent and literate and a lot is not.
Sometimes delicate feelings, such as those of authors and journalists, are offended by web comment, Tough. We dish it out; we should be able to take it. If our critics are hiding, like Prof Figes, behind a conflict of interest, we are in a better position than most to expose them to ridicule.
But the hosts of online comments and reviews need to do some thinking. Respectable newspapers, for example, have long been reluctant to publish anonymous letters in their print publications, allowing writers to withhold their names only if it is necessary for their protection, and, even then, only after establishing that the writers are who they say they are.
But on newspaper websites, pseudonyms are allowed and are widely used. The same is true on sites that review books, hotels and much else. The commercial consequences of those comments can be damaging, or very helpful, to those reviewed.
Some organisations take steps to ensure that people who comment on their sites are doing so in good faith. TripAdvisor.com , the travel website, allows pseudonymous reviews, but says it trawls its site for evidence that hotel owners are trying to boost their own popularity or damage that of rivals. It puts red penalty notices against the names of hotels it says are manipulating the system.
The Financial Times demands that people register before commenting online, and we ask for a post code, employment details and job title, as well as an e-mail address.
The only one we can realistically check is the last. This points to one of the differences between print and the web. A newspaper has limited space to run letters; a newspaper website does not. As the Guardian pointed out last month, checking the identity of 15 to 20 letter-writers a day is manage-able. It would be impossibly timeconsuming to verify several hundred online postings.
So why not do away with anonymity? The internet is an open forum; people can do what they like on their own bits of it. But reputable websites should start insisting people use their names. People may use false ones, of course, but the message will be clear: if you want to speak, please tell us who you are.
People can be mendacious and needlessly offensive using their own names, but they are less likely to be if they think their friends and colleagues might read what they say.
Demand that people use their names and I suspect both the quality of internet argument and level of civility would rise. In many cases, using pseudonyms online has become a habit rather than a necessity.
There are people who do need anonymity: corporate and government whistleblowers, serving soldiers denied the equipment to protect themselves, those living under dictatorships. Free citizens, generally, do not.
You certainly do not need a pseudonym to say what books had disappointing endings, which hotels had shabby furnishings or which cars had clunky steering. The only product reviewers who need to cower behind an alias are those with an undeclared interest or with something to hide.
Ling Gu 
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