Why is The Sunday Times trying to rehabilitate Orlando Figes?

A favourable review by Max Hastings in the "Culture" supplement, a seven-page interview and a book extract in the "Magazine" - WTF is going on?

This is a man who posted damaging reviews of rivals' books on Amazon using the pseudonym "Historian", hired lawyers to threaten one of them with a massive libel suit for revealing that the user name behind the pseudonym was "orlando-birkbeck", let his wife try to take the rap and finally admitted his culpability only when he realized the hard drives of his family's computers were likely to be seized.

Did he voluntarily make amends to the people he blackguarded? No - his lawyers negotiated a private settlement. Did he resign from his professorship at Birkbeck College? No. Does he accept that his actions were those of a slimy, back-stabbing little coward? No.

No, indeed - he "doesn't understand why I acted as I did". He blames "depression and long immersion in the miseries of Stalinist Russia". He blames the "sense of isolation [that] happens with academic work". Then the interview plays the poor little persecuted Jew card: his family were German Jews and his mother's family escaped from Berlin to London  abandoning his grandparents and - possessions! His father left home when he was young and his mother worked, so "he remembers a succession of au pairs".

Awww - diddums! With supreme irony he says his mother "gave me strong morals and values". Possibly she did, but quite evidently this stain on the underwear of academia lost them along the way.