It will be wonderfully freeing, henceforth, for habitual liars to know that the fault lies not in their plummeting morals but in two almond-shaped clusters of brain cells called, rather exotically, the amygdalae. Clever people have got away with talking about the Art of Lying. But there is apparently a science of lying too, according to empirical evidence provided recently by neuroscientists in London. Human beings start by telling little lies. But if they do so regularly enough and in a sufficiently self-serving manner, then the amygdalae get adapted to this activity with alarming rapidity, so that each of their neurons starts singing "It's all right with me" with Cole-Porter-like élan, and the earth is soon peopled with incorrigible liars. Like a lot of scientific research mediated to lay readers by newsmakers, this sounds like age-old wisdom, and, like most of such stuff, it seems to absolve human beings of moral responsibility by locating some behavioural tendency in the genes or hormones or brain cells. Indeed, attributing lies to the adaptability of the brain will not surprise anyone with even a modicum of familiarity with the two great spheres of human distinction: Politics and Art.

One of the first things that began to look boring and irrelevant in the age of Donald Trump, and inimical to the best interests of not only Americans but also the whole of mankind, was nothing less than truth. So, whether Barack Obama's birth certificate was authentic or fake, or whether he had founded the Islamic State, was a matter that could have had nothing to do with something as unbusinessmanlike as empirical evidence. For that matter, India shining its way towards achchhe din, membership of the European Union costing Britain 350 million pounds a week, and, a little further back in the past, Saddam Hussein hiding weapons of mass destruction might all belong to the category of the self-evident - like the fakeness of Mr Obama's birth certificate. These can now be explained away by a cluster of distinguished amygdalae. And that lovely word, white, attaches itself as naturally to the word, lie, as to the word, House, in the fantastical visions of the Anglophone world.

"After all, what is a fine lie?" asks a character called Vivian, the creation of (who else but) Oscar Wilde, in a brilliant essay called "The Decay of Lying", written a little more than a century ago. "Simply that which is its own evidence," is how Vivian answers his own question. Wilde is talking here not about Politics but about Art, where the decay of lying is to be lamented rather than extolled. This would likely have made Plato uncomfortable, although it is difficult to know how literally, or seriously, to take his banishing of poets as liars from the ideal republic. Was it not a Shakespearean jester, after all, who had said that "the truest poetry is the most feigning" - and this was not too far away from London, where not so long ago mendacious amygdalae started to shimmer on the treacherous horizons of science.