Academics like me are skilled users of turnitin.com. Never heard of it? Ask the nearest undergraduate and watch their cheek blanch. Turnitin is the trade’s leading ‘plagiarism detector’. You upload the student’s essay or dissertation and it’s checked against trillions of words and phrases in seconds. (…)

Take, for example, the indisputably most famous and quoted line in English literature, ‘To be, or not to be, that is the question’. Most theatregoers would think the sentence spit new. But should they also go to a performance of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus they would hear the following in the hero’s magnificent opening soliloquy, in which he resolves to sell his soul: ‘Bid Oncaymæon farewell, Galen come’. The Greek Oncaymæon transliterates as ‘being and not being’.

‘To be or not to be’ is not a deeply original thought but a hackneyed sophomoric seminar topic. Hamlet is not thinking, he’s quoting. (…)

Voltaire did not apparently say ‘I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’. As Morson says, ‘the statement belongs to a biographer of Voltaire’. It is what he would have said - utterly Voltairean, but not ipsissima verba.

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oil on oak panel { Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Three Soldiers, 1568 }

ideas | August 22nd, 2011