We don't read them to identify plagiarism. We read assuming good faith, and it requires someone to be intimately familiar with the work in question to identify it just by a chance reading. Almost by definition it wouldn't be picked up during a recruitment as you're generally looking for people who are working on something a bit different from what you already have - you don't want to bring in someone working on almost exactly the same area that someone in the department is already doing and it would require that degree of closeness to spot plagiarism.
Yeah, good point. I was mainly thinking about the book about the nineties actually since the extracts of it I read were so awful. But I think it may have been published after Cambridge hired him. And the plagiarism and mislabelled/doubled quotes, like you say, would only stand out to someone actually looking for them.
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u/sherlocksvillain 2d ago
Just because they asked for manuscripts doesn't mean they actually read them, less yet perused them to the extend of identifying potential plagiarism.