Dan Brown took the stand on Monday to rebut accusations that he copied from other writers’ work to produce his massive best-seller Authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh are suing Da Vinci Code publisher Random House for copyright infringement, claiming Brown ”appropriated the architecture” of their non-fiction book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.
A writer who claims The Da Vinci Code copied from his work insisted in a British court on Wednesday there were specific echoes of his book in the best-selling thriller. However, Michael Baigent conceded there were many differences in detail between The Da Vinci Code and his 1982 non-fiction book.
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/ 21 November 2005
Alfred Anderson, the last surviving person to have heard the guns fall silent along the Western Front during the spontaneous ”Christmas Truce” of World War I, died on Monday at the age of 109. Anderson’s parish priest, the Reverend Neil Gardner, said he died in his sleep early on Monday at a nursing home in Newtyle, Scotland.
Jack Slipper, the Scotland Yard detective who pursued one of Britain’s ”Great Train Robbers” across many years and two continents, has died at the age of 81, the metropolitan police said on Wednesday. The force said the retired detective chief superintendent — known as ”Slipper of the Yard” — died on Wednesday after a long illness.
Filmmaker Roman Polanski on Friday won his libel suit against the publisher of Vanity Fair magazine over an article that accused him of propositioning a woman while on the way to the funeral of his murdered wife. Polanski was awarded £50 000 (R577 000) in damages.
Anglican delegates from the United States and Canada were going before a divided church gathering on Tuesday to explain their stance on homosexuality — an issue that threatens to split the 77-million-strong global communion. Emotions were high at the Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Nottingham, as pro-gay and traditionalist wings of the church appealed for understanding.
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/ 22 October 2004
Like the career of its subject, London’s latest musical began in a blaze of publicity, set tongues wagging and ended, prematurely, in disgrace. Oscar Wilde: The Musical opened on Tuesday at the 500-seat Shaw Theatre. It closed the next day after receiving excoriating reviews and selling just five tickets for its second performance.
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/ 22 October 2004
Like the career of its subject, London’s latest musical began in a blaze of publicity, set tongues wagging and ended, prematurely, in disgrace. Oscar Wilde: The Musical opened on Tuesday at the 500-seat Shaw Theatre. It closed the next day after receiving excoriating reviews and selling just five tickets for its second performance.
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/ 12 October 2004
It has been fenced in, roughed up — critically and literally — and monitored by closed-circuit cameras. Now the problem-plagued Princess Diana memorial fountain in London is to close again for an unspecified period so that the surrounding turf can be re-laid, park officials said on Tuesday.
A computer failure at a British air-traffic control centre grounded many of the country’s flights on Thursday morning, delaying thousands of travellers. The system was running again two hours later, but airports said the backlog of flights would cause serious delays throughout the day.