With a keen imagination, a decent poker face and a career that sometimes revolves around being economical with the truth, it was perhaps inevitable that the PR strategist Ryan Holiday would have a formidable talent for pretending to be someone that he's not.

Even he was surprised by quite how formidable that talent was, though. In a burst of relentless self-promotion that lasted just a few weeks, the self-confident 25-year-old managed to lie his way on to the pages, websites and airwaves of an extraordinary cross-section of America's most prestigious news-gathering organisations.

Earlier this year, Mr Holiday decided, by way of an experiment, to get himself quoted as an "expert" source by the writers of articles and blogs on as many different subjects as possible. The big catch: he wasn't an "expert" in any of the subjects in question, and some of the time, he wouldn't even speak to the writers.