The Habit of LyingLying appears to be ubiquitous, what Franz Kafka called "a universal principle; yet, despite a number of recent books on the subject, it has been given comparatively little genuinely systematic attention by philosophers, social scientists, or even literary theorists. In The Habit of Lying John Vignaux Smyth examines three forms of falsificationlying, concealment, and fictionand makes a strong critique of traditional approaches to each of them, and,