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.