Back in May, I told you why memoirists hate getting reviewed by Tara McKelvey. This weekend, Craig Murray joined their ranks. The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan was annoyed to discover that McKelvey, writing in the NY Times Book Review, had dismissed his memoir, Dirty Diplomacy, as “a mess,” sniffing, “It’s great that someone is telling the truth about Uzbekistan… it’s too bad the someone is Murray, who seems to give the same weight to girlfriend troubles as to arbitrary arrest and detention.”
“Sadly the liberal intelligentsia in the States tends to be dull and balls-achingly politically correct,” Murray writes on his blog. Then he takes note of the earlier complaints about McKelvey as recounted here, and adds his own two cents: “I wonder if her desire for life to be clean, sanitised, depersonalised and not ‘a mess’ results from some underlying psychological problem? Or maybe she’s just very boring.” That’s going to thrill his publicists at Scribner this morning, no doubt.
By the way, here’s a fun fact: The book Scribner is publishing as Dirty Diplomacy: The Rough-and-Tumble Adventures of a Scotch-Drinking, Skirt-Chasing, Dictator-Busting and Thoroughly Unrepentant Ambassador Stuck on the Frontline of the War Against Terror is actually a remix of Murder in Samarkand: A British Ambassador’s Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror. Murray describes the American edition as “slightly shorter” than its British predecessor, but also “less heavily censored because of the protections for freedom of speech in the US.”