Many people were shocked to learn that the winner of the Orange Prize for fiction, Ms Linda Grant, has been accused of lifting passages of her prizewinning novel, When I Lived in Modern Times, from a recent history book about 1940s Palestine.

It was revealed the other day that Grant used Dr Joshua Sherman's Mandate Day: British Lives in Palestine as a source for her novel: after four months of correspondence, Grant's publisher, Granta Books, has agreed to acknowledge Dr Sherman's work in future editions.

We have not been told if any compensation has been paid. If so, it may well have been substantial. We are talking here about intellectual property, the value of which has been soaring in recent times, especially in high-class areas. Today, you can't get a simple two-up two-down film script, play draft, or even a poetic inspiration for love or money. First-time buyers have been priced out completely.

Meanwhile, Ms Grant insists that she is "absolutely not a plagiarist". One understands how she must feel. Successful writers now live in horror of being accused of the crime. Savage reviews are nowhere near so harmful or hurtful.

Plagiarism, conscious and unconscious, is certainly on the increase, but there is a lot of intemperate nonsense talked about it. Quite recently, for example, the eminent homosexual author Hartley ThorpWestington was accused of basing a whole series of his bestselling floral arrangement books on the work of a little-known Victorian botanist, Emily Bean, and he was cruelly hounded in the media as a shameless spreader of the gay plagiarism.

It turned out he had merely used Ms Bean's work as a guide to the best position of longstemmed lilies in drawing-room table-top floral creations. However, his vibrant peony settings, dramatic lone tulip creations and abundant use of Sweet William were all seen to reflect elements of Ms Bean's style, and his career was effectively ruined.

It is notable that in a Times interview the other day, Linda Grant revealed that the basis of her first book, Cast Iron Shore, was a long piece of journalism about Saigon which the then arts editor of the Independent on Sunday had considered "too creative" for publication.

In other words, Ms Grant plagiarised herself. But the notion of an article being "too creative" for newspaper publication is good. It is a popular idea that "creative" people become frustrated in the media by dreary adherence to factual matters, and eventually leave to carve out fabulously successful careers as famous novelists.

Linda Grant's own career undermines this assumption. She was appointed to write a column in the Guardian in the mid-1990s, which in those days was akin to having found the Holy Grail. But she wasn't impressed: "I was talked into it," she says. "The idea of waking up in the morning and having to have an opinion horrified me. I always think - I can't have an opinion about this until I know something more about the subject."

This is a common mistake among fledgling journalists. In reality, most experienced columnists pride themselves on having no opinions of their own at all. Nor do they have the time, and rarely the inclination, to find out "something more" about all the dreary subjects they are obliged to pronounce upon. They are usually appointed because of their complete indifference to all kinds of fact.

Columnists must, however, appear as opinionated as possible. Their golden rule is that there is one side to every story. Accordingly, they manufacture an opinion from whatever material is to hand, and present it as best they can. They do it to a deadline, and they rarely miss. The whole thing is creative in the best sense of the term.

With novelists, however, in recent years there is less and less interest in creativity, but an enormous emphasis on research, on background, on sources and on the accumulation of dreary factual detail.

Linda Grant's own novel has been praised for the oddest reasons. It was noted, for example, in the Times interview that Grant's father was a hairdressers' supplier and that "Grant's knowledge of period hair products is impeccably placed in the book".

Facts may be sacred, but that doesn't always prevent them from being extremely boring.