Almost exactly 100 years ago, the Times Literary Supplement became a standalone publication.

Previously, it had been inserted in The Times, in which guise it had existed for 12 years. It was then owned by Lord Northcliffe, who also owned the Daily Mail. Today, the TLS - as it is affectionately known - is part of Rupert Murdoch's elastic portfolio, for which he deserves a hearty slap on the back. For when all around are dumbing down and pandering to philistinism, the TLS retains its planetary pre-eminence as a reviewing journal.

In a recent issue, the columnist "JC" reflected on its longevity and noted that one of the early articles it published was by Max Beerbohm on the subject of Books Within Books, ie books that are figments of the imagination of novelists, one of whom was Robert Louis Stevenson. In his novel, The Wrong Box, Stevenson invented several novels, including one called Who Put Back The Clock by EHB., of which there are said to be only three copies extant.

By coincidence, I was recently flipping through & Sons, a new novel by David Gilbert, a New York-based writer. In it is a character called AN Dyer, a reclusive author best known for his book Ampersand, "a classic of teenage angst". However, this is not Dyer's only novel. His most recent is titled The Spared Man and previous ones include Here Live Angry Dogs and Brutal Men. Immediately my interest was aroused because I have a weakness for novels featuring novelists, especially those who are on a downward spiral or are suffering from writers' block. If only, I sometimes think, there were more of them in reality.

This device is known in the trade as a form of metafiction, which Chambers defines as "fiction which self-consciously comments on its status as fiction". Less generous souls may think of it as navel-gazing, others as a malign sign of postmodernism. Nevertheless, examples of it are many. For instance, in Margaret Atwood's novel, The Blind Assassin, a writer, Laura Chase, is writing a novel called The Blind Assassin, excerpts from which are reproduced by Atwood. Meanwhile, in Muriel Spark's Loitering With Intent, the narrator, Fleur Talbot, is engaged on a novel with the title Warrender Chase, her first, which she tells us was "really filling" her whole life at that time.

My instinct is to suggest there is perhaps a PhD in this subject though, having said that, I would not be surprised to learn several are already under way. There may even be in existence a bibliography of imaginary book titles, which strikes me as no more useless than some of the sillier things academics pursue. It would be good, too, to have a comprehensive list of fictional novelists complete with information on whom they were modelled.

Browsing through my book shelves I alighted on Anthony Powell's roman fleuve Dance To The Music Of Time and the volume entitled Books Do Furnish A Room. Like his creator, Powell's narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, is a novelist who, taking a breather from writing fiction, is working on a book about Richard Burton, author of The Anatomy Of Melancholy. To make ends meet, Jenkins reviews books, mentioning en passant several that he has in the pipeline: A Stockbroker In Sandals, Slow On The Feather, Moss Off A Rolling Stone, "chronicles of somebody or other's individual fate, on the whole unenthralling enough..."

One of the key characters in Books Do Furnish A Room is the novelist X Trapnel, who was based on Julian Maclaren-Ross, a weel-kent figure in Fitzrovia in the years before and after the war. Trapnel is the author of Camel Ride To The Tomb which, we are told, "had all the marks of having been written by a man who found difficulty in getting on with the rest of the world". This sounds very much like Maclaren-Ross to whom Powell devoted several pages in his memoirs, where, incidentally, he noted that the battle he fought as a writer was "an increasingly losing one to keep contact … with things worth writing about."