Writers, I hope we can all agree, should be paid for their work. That’s the principle behind the law of copyright, and it has held for more than a century. We owe it to (among others) Charles Dickens and Frances Hodgson Burnett. But what about when their work is quoted by other writers?

You’re allowed to quote only a certain proportion of a work before you need to pay the rights holder

This week I published a new book in which I spend a lot of time discussing the work of other writers.