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You can lay many faults at the door of Sir Andrew Motion but plagiarism is not among them.
The former poet laureate has been accused of "shameless burglary" by military historian Ben Shephard, whose research he lifted and put in a poem, An Equal Voice, about shell shock for Remembrance Sunday.
As Motion says in his own defence, there is a tradition of quoting existing texts and altering their emphasis called "found poetry".
What's more, Motion did acknowledge Shephard's book; your average plagiarist does not acknowledge his sources.
Being accused of "ripping off" other writers is an occupational hazard for authors.
Even Winston Churchill was accused of plagiarism after a Cambridge academic discovered that the wartime premier borrowed the famous phrase "the gathering storm", to describe the rise of Nazi Germany, from HG Wells's War of the Worlds.
His faux-Elizabethan rhetoric was much influenced by Shakespeare; key passages in his Second World War history were filched.
But even if Motion hadn't acknow-ledged Shephard, would he still be guilty of plagiarism? In my book, no. All literature is theft.
As TS Eliot said: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." The opening five lines of Eliot's Journey of the Magi are a direct quotation from Lancelot Andrewes's Christmas Day sermon of 1622.
Take the following two sentences: "His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks." "Uselessly, like a sick old seal, Trev's tongue flaps among the rock pools and barnacles of his mouth."
The first was written by Vladimir Nabokov in Pnin in the 1950s; the second by Martin Amis in Other People in the 1980s. Plagiarism or pastiche?
The distinguished tradition of pasticheurs stretches back from Peter Ackroyd to TS Eliot to Shakespeare himself.
The Bard ripped off every plot under the sun. Another eminent pasticheur is David Lodge, who likes to distinguish between plagiarism, the outright stealing of whole paragraphs, and intertextuality, which "must involve significant differences as well as similarity".
It's a brave man or woman who casts the first stone. When Lady Antonia Fraser invited historian James Mackay to "acknowledge where he got his information" in the row over his alleged plagiarism of her biography of Mary Queen of Scots, she too got her comeuppance.
Startling similarities were highlighted between Fraser's 1963 book Dolls and Alice K Early's 1955 English Dolls, Effigies and Puppets.
I am sure Shephard's book too contains echoes of other books he has read and researched. And if I have inadvertently copied and pasted anyone's phrases in the course of this column, I can only apologise.
As my namesake wrote in Sonnet 76, "so all my best is dressing old words new, /spending again what is already spent". Andrew Motion has nothing to atone for.
Sophie's chocolate factory
The divine Sophie Dahl is to produce a new six-part cookery series for BBC2, The Delicious Ms Dahl, which will make your mouth water, judging by the new 60-second promotional clip.
And it promises to be confessional cooking of the highest order.
"My first ever cooking for a man was a disaster," says Dahl. "He came and wolfed my spaghetti carbonara, turned his nose up at my chocolate mousse and left without kissing me - without anything.
"I sobbed all night until my mother said if he won't stick around for your chocolate mousse he's not worth it."
Sophie is not only ravishing on camera, she can cook up a provocative giggle as well.
No doubt the BBC is banking on millions of viewers sticking around for her chocolate mousse.
Glass is half full ... even when empty
The recession has arrived on my doorstep. Walking into my local Threshers off licence, I was mortified to discover that it is closing down in a fortnight, having gone into liquidation (which is an odd thing for an off-licence to do if you think about it. Surely it is already massively in liquidation?).
Thank goodness every cloud has a silver lining: since I will now have to walk that much further afield to buy alcohol, it will be a disincentive to take up those three-for-two offers and spare me lugging all those loud, clanking bottles back home.
• Lord Mandelson accepted the Spectator's Politician of the Year award yesterday, saying he had more in common with Boris Johnson than anyone might think - both had made remarkable comebacks after high-profile resignations and both were doing their best to undermine David Cameron.
Cue guffaws of protest from the London Mayor. Baroness Warsi, shadow minister for Community Cohesion and Social Action, carried off the Peer of the Year, reminding her audience that she was voted most fanciable peer earlier in the year.
Which was not such an achievement, she added, given that she was the only peer with her own set of teeth. Surely a disgraceful slur on Mandelson's gleaming gnashers?
