Harman In My Head

Slate's Ben Rothenberg reports:

What's this about?

The gift shop at Wimbledon, which rests above the subterranean Wimbledon museum, sells towels, polo shirts, and even strawberry-shaped earrings. The shop also sells a yearbook, known as the Official Wimbledon Annual. The 2013 annual, a compendium of photos and writings from that year's tournament, featured a cover shot of Andy Murray kissing the championship trophy.

We need to know this why?

By the end of this year's tournament, which was contested from June 23 to July 6, the 2013 annual had been removed from the Wimbledon bookshelves. It has also been removed from Wimbledon’s online shop. The book should have disappeared from circulation long before that. Months earlier, as first reported today in the UK magazine Private Eye (the article is not currently available online), Wimbledon employees had learned that the author, Neil Harman, had plagiarized large swaths of the 2013 book.

And who is Mr Harman?

Harman, a correspondent for the Times of London, is a pre-eminent figure in the tennis press.

A correspondent for the Times of London.

Read the thing yourselves, of course (some of the plagiarism is as eyewatering as we've become accustomed to where Mr Harman's Times colleague is concerned) but here's some more familiar-sounding tasters.

large chunks of the book had been taken from other sources without attribution

many examples of clear-cut plagiarism

the paragraphs are nearly identical

It's on Ray's kind of scale as well:

My personal review of the 2013 book found 14 large passages taken without attribution. Further, my examination of his writing for the previous two Wimbledon annuals revealed at least eight instances of obvious plagiarism in the 2012 book, and a staggering 30 in the 2011 edition, bringing the total to at least 52 in the last three books.

Well-known anti-plagiarism crusader and novelist Jeremy Duns comments:

As he says, indeed.

[Thanks to Pablo Byrne]

[Ray Keene index]

[Ray Keene plagiarism index]