Henry Fielding

Who’s deceiving whom?: The Art of the Lie, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson, reviewed

5 July 2025 9:00 am

A struggling widow hooks up with a serial confidence trickster in a novel as witty and ruthlessness as its Georgian setting

Liberty is a loaded word

8 March 2025 9:00 am

Just about everyone is for it, but we mean different things by it – whether it be the freedom of independence or the absence of coercive constraint

‘The wickedest man in Europe’ was just an intellectual provocateur

4 January 2025 9:00 am

Sir Bernard Mandeville certainly revelled in mischief-making; but his one simple idea – that human beings are animals – seems unremarkable today

Epics are hard and dull – but today’s are ‘great’ and ‘nice’

20 April 2019 9:00 am

Spoiler alert: in Henry Fielding’s play Tom Thumb, the hero is swallowed by a cow ‘of larger than the usual…