The February 20, 2020, issue online of The London Review of Books features a recording of the first of this year’s LRB Winter Lectures, given at the British Museum on January 31 by Colin Burrow, of Oxford University, entitled “Fiction and the Ages of Lies.” It prompted Scott Herrick, of Rio Rancho, New Mexico, to write in to the LRB and quote from John Ruskin, in Modern Painters (1860), on the essence of lying. The complete quotation is given above. What Ruskin says here about lying anticipates Mark Twain’s account of the “silent lie”, which is discussed in my essay “The Noble Art of Lying.”

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