Why Finger Novelists When Newspaper Columnists Are Far the Worst Plagiarists?

The Herald › March 03, 2006

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Summary

WHEN my 20-something daughter offered me The Da Vinci Code last year, I replied: "No thanks. I read that rubbish 20 years ago, but it was then called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail."Against the background of its authors' suit against their own publisher, Rosemary Goring's article on plagiarism made entertaining reading (March 1). It may well be that "Raymond Carver's estate could demand compensation from almost every wannabe novelist in the Englishspeaking world". If so then Carver's estate might suffer the same fate as that of Anton Chekhov whom, to be fair, Carver acclaimed "the greatest short-story writer who ever lived".

But why does Rosemary Goring finger aspiring novelists when the worst plagiarists are her fellow newspaper columnists? I suspect a Nelson eye wrapped in esprit de corps inside omert. (The last phrase is, of course, a disguised plagiarism of Churchill's "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma". ) Closer to home, I recall a Herald columnist of distinction who lifted, almost verbatim, several paragraphs from Katherine Whitehorn's Cooking in a Bed-sitter. This was a particularly risky since Ms Whitehorn was herself a columnist with The Observer. Closer still, I was amused a decade ago to discover an idea I had verbally expounded (anent 1603) appear in a newspaper column but staggered when the same words appeared in a speech by the secretary of state for Scotland. The columnist by that time had become Michael Forsyth's special adviser.