It is based on real events, but those real events have been woven into the story devised by the defendant, and have themselves been adapted to suit the story.” The claimant stressed in her evidence that while it was her object to tell the story in an accessible and readable manner, reading more like fiction, the book is not a work of fiction and describes actual events. The essential reason for this is that Lara and TSWK are fundamentally different works. However, in a judgment at the high court in London on Tuesday, Mr Justice Edwin Johnson said: “It is clear that the defendant did not copy from Lara the selection of events in the relevant chapters of TSWK or any part of that selection. Pasternak claimed it copied a substantial part of the selection, structure and arrangement of facts and incidents that she said she created when she wrote Lara. Prescott’s novel, a fictionalised account of how the CIA planned to use Doctor Zhivago as a propaganda tool during the cold war, was published in 2019 as part of a $2.5m two-book deal with Penguin Random House.

Ivinskaya was the muse for the character of Lara, played by Julie Christie, in David Lean’s 1965 film adaptation of Doctor Zhivago, which also starred Omar Sharif.

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