Sterne

Sterne spent much of 1959 traipsing through Africa reporting on the decolonization of the continent.

Somewhere in the Afterlife, Laurence Sterne must have been tickled to see his fiendish book infused with new life.

Thus his love of escapist, desperately lighthearted writers like Laurence Sterne and Miguel de Cervantes.

Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne One of the first novels in English ... and a buoyant, postmodern romp.

Many of them—from Denis Diderot and Lawrence Sterne to David Hume and Adam Smith—met in the Paris salon of Baron Thierry Holbach.

Sterne, in his "Sentimental Journey," gives a pleasing description of snuff-taking with the poor monk.

We were shown the little room not more than nine feet square where Sterne, when vicar, wrote his greatest book, "Tristram Shandy."

He attributes much to the imprudence, or imbecility of the enemy, whose plan of saving an army he likens to Sterne's marble sheet.

Sterne's sentiment and discursiveness found several feeble imitators.

And yet in Hamburg Sterne waited full two years for a scanty recognition even of his English fame.