All of us lie, but I do it less than most people. I am not talking here about minor evasion, complimenting a neighbour on his lamentable taste or falsely reassuring a friend about her steatopygic tendencies. Last year a Dr Vasudevi Reddy, of the psychology department at the University of Portsmouth, published a study suggesting that infants dissemble from as early as six months, particularly in the form of “fake crying”.

Obviously I probably did all that.

My problem is any lying that may, somewhere down the road, require an act of invention; something that could possibly be discovered as a lie.

This might be simple as, say, “Have you read The Waste Land?”. Clearly, readers of The Times have a right to expect that someone as well paid as I can quote at length from that work, and so the motive for fibbing is definitely present.

But I can't cope with even this untruth. The fear that counteracts the lying impulse is faster than thought. What if I falsely say yes, and the next question is, “And what did you make of the famous fifth stanza?”. Pretty quickly, unless I am very imaginative and cool, I will be exposed both as an ignoramus and as a liar. So I'll just stick with the ignoramus.

It hasn't happened very often (and, I hasten to add for the sake of my acquaintances, not recently) that someone I know has been revealed to have been conducting a long-term affair. And I always wonder how on earth they have managed it. Where did they say they were on the nights in question? How did they answer inquiries about their fictional overtime and imagined visits? Since my earliest years, if someone to whom I owe an answer has asked me a direct question, I have been too terrified of the consequences to lie. When I tried, I would blush, bluster and sweat.

So when many people demanded to know, towards the end of last week, how could John Darwin, the Seaton canoeist and his wife, Anne, have done that to their own children, my question was rather: “How could they have done it at all?”

Actually let's refine this even further. I can conceive that the indebted Mr Darwin's disappearance was an alternative to suicide, and - in the end - all he did was to grow a beard and skulk around in spare rooms, with the occasional furtive walk and visit to the library. His must have been a tedious life, but it won't have taxed his ingenuity. If the Nazis were in power in Britain, I think I could manage hiding.

His wife, however, was required to sustain a lie in what can only be described as an epic way. It isn't even as if the well-understood method of coping - to get to believe one's own lie, was open to her, not with her supposedly sea-buried spouse Radovaning around next door.

Every time she played the part of the widow, she would - within hours - be married again. She wept “inconsolably” when told of his death, and subsequently when discussing her lost husband with her sons. She flung flowers into the sea on the first anniversary of his death, and for four more years maintained the role of the bereft wife to her family, to her husband's family and to the rest of the world. And then went back and watched TV with him and ate dinner with him.

She had to play the part in every phone call, every conversation, in every mannerism. It is an act of sustained imagination worthy of any novelist or playwright. I could murder someone in anger, I could steal if I had to, but I can no more contemplate doing what Anne Darwin did so successfully than I could compose a symphony.

Anne Darwin is a thief and a fraudster, but she also belongs in the Fabulist's Hall of Fame. Her exploits put me in mind of that sequence of American journalists of the 1980s and 1990s, who sought acclaim through confected reportage.

There was Janet Cooke, the Washington Post Pulitzer prize-winner, whose 1980 story about an eight-year-old heroin addict in the capital turned out to be a complete fiction; Stephen Glass, of the magazine The New Republic, 27 of whose 41 stories, turned out to contain fabricated passages or facts; Jayson Blair, of The New York Times, whose quotes and interviews would be made up, and who didn't go where he said he did (and who seems to be the model for a character in the fifth series of the US television show The Wire); and several more.

That we have not had a similar scandal in Britain, despite our less rigorous attitude towards checking facts, must be considered a minor miracle. Perhaps we are just too small a country for big public lies to get lost in. All we have are a few faked photos and (I am told) at least one newspaper that occasionally instructs its writers to “fudge” an inconvenient fact or absence of facts.

Nor has there been a British Binyamin Wilkomirski, whose 1995 memoir of a Holocaust infancy, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood 1939-1948, was reviewed in The New York Times as a “slender, lyrical book [that] provides a fascinating psychological study of identity... he writes with a poet's vision, a child's state of grace.”

Unfortunately, Wilkomirski was discovered to have been, in fact, a Bruno Grosjean from Switzerland, born in 1941, who spent his first years in that neutral country. He had invented the entire thing - every memory, impression and feeling. In a similar way the drug and alcohol abuse of James Frey, well sold as A Million Little Pieces, also turned out to be a confabulation.

Or maybe our Wilkomirski awaits uncovering. But what strikes me every time I think about it, is the imaginative energy of these liars.

Wouldn't they make wonderful spies? Good TV dramatists? Perhaps, though, the whole point of their exercise is the ability to convince people that a lie is the truth. A recent study conducted by the University of Southern California seemed to suggest that pathological liars were endowed with additional white matter - conductive matter, apparently - in the brain, allowing them better mastery of the complexity of their own lies.

“Our argument,” one of the researchers said, “is that the more networking there is in the prefrontal cortex, the more the person has an upper hand in lying. Their verbal skills are higher. They've almost got a natural advantage.” Which is certainly another way of looking at Anne Darwin. Expect her regular column in The New York Times sometime in 2012.

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