Dan Brown continued to insist in court, defending himself against plagiarism charges, that he and his wife, Blythe, had not bought or even read a copy of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail until a late stage of the research, long after he had submitted the synopsis for his own proposed book. He said the “clear point of evidence” was he had not included HBHG in the bibliography in his synopsis for the publishers. “I was very eager to impress my publishers with a longer list of bibliography … if I had read it I would have included it.”