Status Anxiety | 19 July 2008

I was told at a very early stage in my writing career never to seek revenge on critics. If you get a poor review, you just have to take it on the chin. To write a letter of complaint to the publication in question — or, worse, punch the critic on the nose — is a terrible faux pas. The correct response when asked about a bad notice is to pretend you have not read it.   

But what if the boot is on the other foot? Is it acceptable for critics to write about the efforts that have been made to retaliate against them? Or is that a breach of etiquette, too? Earlier this year, my friend Sebastian Shakespeare was confronted by an angry young man who objected to something that had appeared about him in the Londoner’s Diary, the column Sebastian edits on the Evening Standard. He punched him in the face, then deposited a bucket of manure on his head as he sat in the driver’s seat of his open-topped BMW.