A negative review might once have prompted a stern letter to the editor of the relevent publication. Today, the weapon of choice for an angry author appears to be Twitter.

Novelist Alice Hoffman was so enraged last weekend by a lacklustre review in the Boston Globe - her new novel, The Story Sisters, apparently "lacks the spark of [her] earlier work" - that she tweeted furiously: "Roberta Silman in the Boston Globe is a moron. How do some people get to review books? Now any idiot can be a critic." She completed a comprehensive act of revenge by tweeting Silman's phone number and email address so her followers could "tell her what u think of snarky critics".

She's not the only author talking back - Alain de Botton defended his latest book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, following a bad review in the New York Times. "The accusations you level at me are simply extraordinary ... You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that," he wrote on the reviewer Caleb Crain's blog. "Don't worry, it hopefully won't be pistols at dawn. But bear in mind that Proust fought a duel over a review," de Botton then tweeted. "I'm trying out an eye for an eye - the accusation was enormous." Curiously, de Botton yesterday removed those tweets.

UCL's professor of English, John Mullan, thinks we can "expect more of the same. People complaining on Twitter is a safety valve." But despite the immediacy - and accountability - the internet offers, "a dignified silence is best" following a negative review says philosopher AC Grayling. (He was recently the victim of an outraged online response from novelist Charlotte Greig after he said that the best thing about her debut, A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy, was its title.) Controversial award-winning children's author Melvin Burgess, who saw his novel Doing It described as "vile [and] disgusting" in the Guardian, agrees. "I've managed to resist temptation [to respond] so far," he says. "You'd just come out of it with no dignity and your pants in tatters."