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BOB DYLAN has been accused of plagiarising sections of his Nobel Prize lecture, lifting sections from a popular series of revision guides.

Dylan, the first musician to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, delivered a lecture on June 4 at the Swedish Academy in Los Angeles – a requirement for claiming his $900,000 (£700,000) prize.

He was awarded the prize in October, and declined to attend the December ceremony. In the 26-minute lecture, he said: “Specific books … have stuck with me ever since I read them way back in grammar school – I want to tell you about three of them.”

The 76-year-old then spoke about and quoted from Homer’s Odyssey, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

Sara Danius, the secretary for the academy, posted the Swedish version of Dylan’s speech on her blog on June 7, describing it as “beautiful”.

But suspicions have now been raised that the sections of Dylan’s speech in which he quoted from Moby Dick were lifted from Sparknotes, a revision guide for students. The quotes he attributed to Herman Melville are not in the 1851 novel. Instead they are found as summaries written in Sparknotes.

In his speech, Dylan said: “Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness.” Spark Notes uses the phrase “someone whose trials have led him toward God rather than bitterness”.

Journalists went on to find 20 other sentences with traces and phrases from the Moby Dick Sparknotes.

Dylan has not responded to requests for comment.

It is a predicament with which many are familiar. A speech looms and the words do not materialise. Hours spent scratching around for the right sentiments are wasted. As the deadline nears, so grows the temptation to pilfer. Who will notice a small joke or an academic line or two lifted from an obscure corner of the internet? The answer – if you are Bob Dylan and the occasion is the Nobel Prize ceremony – is everyone. Not that Dylan is necessarily guilty. Perhaps his Nobel appreciation of Moby Dick just happened to echo the Spark Notes for students of the same text. Perhaps. But then Dylan has long made cultural larceny a spur for fearless originality. As the

Telegraph has often put it: Don’t you know there’s nothing new that’s under the sun? Well, there ain’t no man righteous, no not one.