Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy. Sterne's comic masterpiece is an extravagantly inventive work which was hugely popular when first published in 1759. Its often bawdy humour, and numerous digressions, are combined with bold literary experiment, such as a page printed entirely black to mark the death of one of the novel's characters. Dr Johnson wrote that "Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last" - but two hundred and fifty years after the book's publication, Tristram Shandy remains one of the most influential and widely admired books of the eighteenth century.

With:

Judith Hawley Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London

John Mullan Professor of English at University College London

Mary Newbould Bowman Supervisor in English at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge.

Producer: Thomas Morris.