"'Only two people?' I asked"
This caught my eye because I have Claire Tomalin's Dickens biography in my to-read pile: a tale of Dickens, Dostoevsky, the meeting that didn't happen, the short story that didn't exist, sockpuppets, blacklists, and breasts.

TEAL DEER SPOILER VERSION (maybe not safe for work?): Stephanie Harvey, the originator of the "Dickens totes met Dostoevsky" anecdote that ended up in several Dickens biographies was a sockpuppet. She had previously written an article insisting that a Leo Bellingham short story was superior to a Doris Lessing story, while also quoting the titillating parts at suspicious length. The investigator writing this article, Eric Naiman, basically went "Wait, who the fuck is Leo Bellingham?"; Naiman waded through more scholarly sockpuppetry to an embittered author named A.D. Harvey, who complained that he'd been put on a scholarly blacklist with one other guy. However, One Other Guy also seems to have plagiarized A.D. Harvey's work: "Towards the end of [1988], Speck took the extraordinary step of sending the journal’s subscribers a supplementary article by Howard Nenner, a professor at Smith College, which was printed on gummed pages" to paste over (!) McGovern's plagiarism. WAIT, NO: "Speck then went to London and found the address from which the McGovern article had been mailed. Nobody called Trevor McGovern had been in residence there, but Speck learned that until recently one of the inhabitants had been A. D. Harvey." Dun dun dunnnnn. And then there's a lengthy discussion of fictional nipple coloration, which leads into recycled/self-plagiarized excerpts from the "Leo Bellingham" book:

Several other passages in “Graduate Sex” are nearly verbatim replicas of passages in Oxford, including a sexual partner who cries out “I LIKE you!” in the middle of coitus, and two nearly identical phrases uttered by women to protagonists in erectile distress: “I’m not used to feeling penises casually” ("Oxford").

AND THEN THERE'S ANOTHER SOCKPUPPET NOVELIST. I think? I lost count, but there's at least eight (nine?) distinct sockpuppets/pseudonyms in there, plus the references "Stephanie" Harvey made up, and the name "Stephanie" may have come from a girl who was the basis for the dismally unfulfilling sex scenes of whichever novel by whichever pseudonym. She definitely has pink nipples that taste of zinc ointment, that's all I know.

When Naiman writes Harvey for comment, he replies,

“Dear Professor Naiman, What a coincidence: I was writing a comic novel about everyday life in Soviet Russia just at the time the regime disintegrated. Not that I can read or speak Russian, only French, German and Italian. I look forward to learning about significant overlap in your article. I hope you mentioned all eight of my academic monographs and my contributions to journals published in the US.”

Looks like I'm gonna have to paste some kind of correction into my copy of the Tomalin book. What I really want now is for Eric Naiman to turn out to be all of these people.