Willy The Wizard struck out

The long-running - if "running" doesn't imply a degree of urgency that seems to have been completely lacking - claim that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire plagiarised a book with the banal title "Willy the Wizard" has been struck out after the claimant failed to make a payment to the court for security for the defendants' costs, which are already considerable. Guardian Law has the story, which suggests that the claim was doomed to failure and may have been nothing more than a publicity stunt. It sounds as if Willy the Wizard is a remarkably ordinary piece of work, an accusation that could hardly be levelled against Harry Potter - which seems to have popularised reading, and reading almost on a Tolstoyan scale, for a whole generation of children. And many adults, though I found insufficient in the first book to draw me in, unlike Philip Pullman's great trilogy.