was a Yorkshire soldier who served as an officer in Flanders under the Duke of Marlborough during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714). His mother, Agnes, the widow of another English army officer, married Roger Sterne while he was on campaign in Dunkirk in 1711. Laurence was born on 24 November 1713 at Clonmel, Co. Tipperary (Ireland), where his father's regiment was stationed. Sterne spent his early childhood following the regiment's many transfers both in Ireland and England, and this close contact with military life would later inspire him for the creation of some of his most notable comic characters (especially Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim and Lieutenant Le Fever in Tristram Shandy). This work is regarded as the progenitor of the 20th-cent. stream-of-consciousness novel. The word “shandy” means “crack-brained, half-crazy”, and Tristram, in Volume VI of his book, declares that he is writing a “civil, nonsensical, good humoured Shandean book.” The work consists of a slim line of narrative constantly interrupted by exuberant digressions, exploiting the relativity of time in human experience by deliberately disordering the sequence of events. Parodying the “new novel” form, the narrator mocks the absurdity of development in narrative, insisting on beginning at the moment of his own conception, and deliberately providing no consistent plot or conclusion.

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