How well I remember the sweetness of it. I was sit­ ting on a plane, reading a copy of The Spectator. Taki Theodoracopulos had written one of his “High Life” columns taking off after the sodomites of the Big Bagel (as he thoughtfully described the gorgeous mosaic of gay life in Manhattan). It was a spirited piece, made no less so by my growing conviction that I had read it before.

By the time the plane landed, I had attained the “Gotcha” moment that is the Nirvana of the vengeful reader. It took me only an hour to get a fax of the “original article” (by Norman Podhoretz in the New York Post a few weeks previously), compare the sen­ tences word for word, and fire off an extremely contented and self-righteous letter to the editor of The Spectator. I knew that he would have no choice but to print it, and Taki and I were not get­ ting on very well at the time, so it was one of the most chore-free pieces of un­ paid writing that I have ever done.

Dear reader, mark the sequel. Not many years later I wrote a strangely neglected book on the sculpture of the Parthenon. Reviewing this learned yet passionate text, *The Spectator’*s critic was good enough to notice a paragraph of mine about the arrangement of certain ancient stones. With a maddening loftiness, he com­ pared it to another paragraph, written by quite another author in quite an­ other book, and found it disconcertingly similar. Well, I mean to say, that was an entirely different matter.

Once again I found myself writing (and once again, revoltingly, without any suggestion of payment) a letter to the editor of this irresponsible magazine. The case was quite clear and the misunderstanding laughably self­evident to any serious reader. Both I and Mr. William St. Clair—this was the name of the other author—had obviously drawn on the same original eyewitness de­ scription of the Acrop­ olis. What could be more natural than that both of us, committed scholars in our different ways, should have summarized the same source in much the same fashion? I need hardly say that that was the end of the story, except that I still wake up whimpering about it.

Plagiarism. A nasty little word. In the world of classical antiquity (not that I have any great desire to bring that up all over again) the word plagiarius, which to Cicero meant manstealer or kidnapper, was used by Martial to denote a literary thief. Ever since, the crime has haunted writers of all calibers.

Only a few weeks ago, Julian Barnes received a rather tepid review in The Times Literary Supplement of his new short-story collection, Cross Channel. The reviewer compared its style unfavorably with a “resonant image” in Barnes’s earlier novel Flaubert’s Parrot: “A pier is a disappointed bridge.” Then came one of those fearful letters, pointing out (doubtless to the discomfiture also of the reviewer, who hadn’t noticed it) that the line was from James Joyce’s Ulysses. So the question is: Did Barnes pick up this happy phrase subliminally, did he “annex” it for his own purposes, or did he simply assume that any litterate reader would spot the reference? I should say that this isone of the public questions most dreaded by writers of fiction, the other being the eqully knowing one about how much of their work is “autobiographical.”

An enterprising editor could probably appoint a special correspondent to cover plagiarism, and see the poor guy or gal worked nearly to death. Think only of monitoring Ruth Shalit, whose secret until recently was that she filched sentences from writers—such as Fred barnes and David Broder—whom she could be reasonably sure nobody else was bothering to read. Clever, but, as events have proved, not quite clever enough. *The New Yorker’*s February appreciation of Joseph Brodsky said that he had had a heart attack coming surely as next Christmas, a memorable line appropriated (honestly enough I thought) from Philip Larkin’s All What Jazz. Arianna Stassinopoulous Huffington, author of Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, put herself memorably in the debt of Ms. Lydia Gasman, who seems to have written an earlier study of Picasso which the divine Arianna did not acquire by transcendental means. And while we are on the subject of My Sweet Lord—a favored Huffington invocation—we find that not even the world of music is immune. George Harrison had to pay a tidy sum to the Chiffons, whose 1963 smash “ldquo;He’s So Fine” was ruled by a court to be the melodic ancestor of Geroge’s 1971 chartbuster. Experts have been retained on all sides to debate whether Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber ran out of inspiration and went with good old Puccini for some moments in The Phantom of the Opera.