A WELL-THUMBED paperback copy of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, heavily marked and annotated in a variety of coloured inks, took centre stage at the High Court in London yesterday.

It was Dan Brown’s personal copy, and the author of The Da Vinci Code flicked back and forth through its copious pages in the witness box as he was pressed under cross-examination on when exactly he had first read it.

Two of HBHG’s co-authors are suing Mr Brown for breach of copyright, claiming that his successful thriller is at least partly based on their work. Mr Brown denies the charge, insisting that he read HBHG late in his writing process and that, anyway, all that book’s themes can be found in other sources.

Mr Brown at times appeared to be on the ropes under the cross-examination of Jonathan Rayner-James, QC, counsel for the claimants, who wanted to know why his copy of HBHG seemed to have many more page marks, underlinings and turned-up page corners than most of his 40-odd other source books.

Ah, Mr Brown said, most of these would have been done by his wife after DVC was published. During promotional tours he was being asked so many detailed questions that he asked her to give him a refresher course on the facts of DVC. And, he conceded, HBHG was an excellent source of basic facts on early Christian history. Mr Brown was exceedingly vague on the dates of his own writing history, but he strongly denied a suggestion that he had read HBHG before even writing the synopsis for DVC; he had, he said come to it late, after the storyline of DVC had already been assembled. The ideas for the plot had come from other books such as The Templar Revelation, which he freely admits drawing on.

From the bench, Mr Justice Peter Smith did not appear entirely to believe him. “It says in The Templar Revelation that HBHG is essential reading [for anyone interested in the the theory that Christ married, had children and that his bloodline still lives]. Are you asking me to believe that you did not read it? How could you have missed it?” the judge asked.

Mr Brown replied that The Templar Revelation had given him everything he needed to write his synopsis; at that stage he was interested in the broad picture, not the details.

Returning to the green ink markings in Mr Brown’s copy of HBHG, which he had voluntarily surrendered as evidence, Mr Rayner-James claimed that some of the annotations highlighted an aspect of the plot that was in the synopsis but not in the final novel, that the character murdered in the early pages was to have been the father of Sophie, the heroine, but in the final version was her grandfather.

The implication was that Mr Brown was mining HBHG at an early stage. “You can’t look at a pen mark and tell when it was made,” Mr Brown maintained.

Last week John Baldwin, QC, for Mr Brown’s publishers, Random House, cross-examining the claimants, argued that it did not matter when Mr Brown had consulted HBHG; the ideas he used were all in the public domain, and that there could be no copyright on ideas, only on the development of them.

Turning to another document, Mr Rayner-James directed Mr Brown to one of his own research papers, which quoted heavily from HBHG but with comments and annotations which, counsel suggested, appeared to be the work of Blythe Brown, his wife. “That has been downloaded from the internet,” Mr Brown insisted, although unable to be precise about its origins. “Look, it has British spelling and British punctuation. My wife would never spell ‘behaviour’ like that.”

The hearing continues.

www.timesonline.co.uk/law

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