In the most recent issue of The Times Literary Supplement, Rory Stewart, former Tory minister, described Boris Johnson, the current Prime Minister of the UK, as follows: “Johnson is after all the most accomplished liar in public life – perhaps the best liar ever to serve as prime minister. Some of this may have been a natural talent – but a lifetime of practice and study has allowed him to uncover new possibilities which go well beyond all the classifications of dishonesty attempted by classical theorists like St. Augustine. He has mastered the use of error, omission, exaggeration, diminution, equivocation and flat denial. He has perfected casuistry, circumlocution, false equivalence and false analogy. He is equally adept at the ironic jest, the fib and the grand lie; the weasel word and the half-truth; the hyperbolic lie, the obvious lie, and the bullshit lie – which may inadvertently be true.” (“Lord of Misrule“, review of Boris Johnson: The Gambler, by Tom Bower, TLS, November 6, 2020, 4).

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.”

The poster for this Tom Cruise movie about DEA informant Barry Seal says that it is “Based On A True Lie.” There are lies that are true. When a liar asserts what the liar believes to be false, but the liar is mistaken, and the liar asserts what is true, then the lie is a true lie. The liar is still a liar, even if the hearer is not deceived (although the hearer may still be deceived about what the liar believes). This is not what the poster is referring to, however. Presumably, it is referring to a lie (or deception) that was actually told (or perpetrated) by the U.S. government. Interestingly, the movie’s director, Doug Liman, has described the movie as “a fun lie based on a true story.” Strictly speaking, however, a fictional movie cannot be a lie. On why works of fiction cannot be lies, see my “Novels Never Lie.”