Writers and copyright lawyers breathed more easily yesterday after a High Court judge ruled that The Da Vinci Code, the bestselling thriller by Dan Brown, had not stolen core ideas from an earlier non-fiction work.

Mr Justice Peter Smith rejected the high-profile copyright infringement claim brought by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, two of the three authors of a 1980s book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, against Random House, publisher of The Da Vinci Code.