Copy writer

It takes extraordinary chutzpah for a novelist to make unacknowledged borrowings from The Great Gatsby, All Quiet On The Western Front and Anna Karenina in the first place, let alone to offer the sort of bullish justification that John Hughes has: "I don't think I am a plagiarist more than any other writer who has been influenced by the greats who have come before them. I've always used the work of other writers in my own. It's a rare writer who doesn't ... It's a question of degree." He went on to imply that he's one of the "good poets" of T S Eliot's The Sacred Wood, who make what they take "into something better, or at least something different".

The problem for Hughes is that this line of defence simply doesn't tally with the other one he's offered - namely, that the similarities are the consequence of a messy research process for the offending novel, The Dogs, which took place over a number of years. He claims that various passages from the English translation of Svetlana Alexievich's The Unwomanly Face Of War somehow became entangled with his own transcripts to the extent that he came to believe it was all his own work.

So, either he was deliberately making use of the words of others as a creative/stylistic exercise, or he did so accidentally because of an inability to organise his notes -which is it?

It's alarming how regularly over the past few years I've come across academics whose referencing is shoddy (especially given that they're supposedly teaching good citation practice to students), but the inclination in the vast majority of cases has been to give them the benefit of the doubt. It doesn't look as though Hughes is going to be so fortunate.