My review of the book is found here. The following quotes may reveal more about the book than you should know of, if you plan to read it.

A stab had clearly once been made at de-uglifying these public spaces by painting a corridor a jaunty yellow. This was because, it turned out, babies come here to have their brains tested and someone thought the yellow might calm them. But I couldn't see how. Such was the oppressive ugliness of this building it would have been like sticking a red nose on a cadaver and calling it Ronald McDonald.

I glanced into offices. In each a neurologist or psychologist was hunkered down over their desk, concentrating hard on something brain-related. In one room, I learned, the field of interest was a man from Wales who could recognize all his sheep as individuals but couldn't recognize human faces, not even his wife, not even himself in the mirror. The condition is called prosopagnosia“” face blindness. Sufferers are apparently forever inadvertently insulting their workmates and neighbors and husbands and wives by not smiling back at them when they pass them on the street, and so on. People can't help taking offense even if they consciously know the rudeness is the fault of the disorder and not just haughtiness. Bad feelings can spread.

In a third office I saw a woman with a Little Miss Brainy book on her shelf. She seemed cheerful and breezy and good-looking.

“Who's that?“ I asked James.

“Essi Viding,“ he said.

“What does she study?“ I asked.

“Psychopaths,“ said James.

I peered in at Essi. She spotted us, smiled and waved. “That must be dangerous,“ I said.

“I heard a story about her once,“ said James. “She was interviewing a psychopath. She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn't know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them.“

Life is meant to be a joyous adventure. Joe K

The days that followed passed slowly. I lay in my hotel room and watched the kind of strange European TV that would probably make perfect sense if I understood the language, but because I didn't, the programs just seemed dreamlike and baffling. In one studio show a group of Scandinavian academics watched as one of them poured liquid plastic into a bucket of cold water. It solidified, they pulled it out, handed it around the circle, and, as far as I could tell, intellectualized on its random misshapenness. I phoned home but my wife didn't answer. It crossed my mind that she might be dead. I panicked. Then it turned out that she wasn't dead. She had just been at the shops.

I knew from seeing stricken loved ones that many of the disorders listed“”depression and schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive disorder and so on“”are genuine and overwhelming and devastating. But as L. J. Davis, reviewing the DSM in Harper's, once wrote: “It may very well be that the frotteurist is a helpless victim in the clutches of his obsession, but it's equally possible that he's simply a bored creep looking for a cheap thrill.“

Brian is a Scientologist. He works for the British office of an international network of Scientologists called the CCHR (Citizens Commission on Human Rights), a crack team determined to prove to the world that psychiatrists are wicked and must be stopped. There are Scientologists like Brian in CCHR offices all over the world spending every day of their lives ferreting out stories aimed at undermining the psychiatry profession and getting individual psychiatrists shamed or struck off. Brian was incredibly biased, of course“”Tom Cruise once said in a taped speech to Scientologists, “We are the authorities on the mind!““”but I wanted to hear about the times psychiatry had really got it wrong and nobody knew these stories better than he did.

Tony said faking madness was the easy part, especially when you're seventeen and you take drugs and watch a lot of scary movies. You don't need to know how authentically crazy people behave. You just plagiarize the character Dennis Hopper played in the movie Blue Velvet. That's what Tony did. He told a visiting psychiatrist that he liked sending people love letters straight from his heart and a love letter was a bullet from a gun and if you received a love letter from him, you'd go straight to hell. Plagiarizing a well-known movie was a gamble, he said, but it paid off. Lots more psychiatrists began visiting his cell. He broadened his repertoire to include bits from Hellraiser, A Clockwork Orange, and the David Cronenberg movie Crash, in which people derive sexual pleasure from enacting car crashes. Tony told the psychiatrists he liked to crash cars into walls for sexual pleasure and also that he wanted to kill women because he thought looking into their eyes as they died would make him feel normal. “Where did you get that one from?“ I asked Tony. “A biography of Ted Bundy,“ Tony replied. “I found it in the prison library.“ I nodded and thought it probably wasn't a great idea for prison libraries to stock books about Ted Bundy.

Tommy said that I, unlike most journalists, was a freethinker, not in the pay of anti-Scientologist-vested interests and willing to entertain unexpected realities. He handed me a copy of the in-house Scientology magazine, Freedom, which referred to the three people who had made the accusations against David Miscavige as The Kingpin, The Conman, and The Adulteress. The Adulteress was in fact “a repeat adulteress“ who refused to “curb her wanton sexual behavior,“ perpetrated “five incidents of extramarital indiscretions,“ and “was removed from the Church for ecclesiastical crimes.“ I looked up from the magazine.

“What about the extreme all-night version of musical chairs?“ I asked. There was a short silence.

“Yes, well, Mr. Miscavige did make us do that,“ said Tommy. “But it wasn't anywhere near as bad as it was reported. Anyway. Let's give you a tour so we can educate you on what Scientology is really about.“

But then it veered into speculative territory. Here was Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner apparently cruelly isolating his baby daughter Deborah in a Perspex box for a year. The archive actually captured her looking quite happy in the box, and I later did some fact-checking and discovered she's contended throughout her life that the box was basically just a crib and she was hardly ever in there anyway and her father was in fact a lovely man. The DVD commentary said, “In every city, every state, every country, you will find psychiatrists committing rape, sexual abuse, murder, and fraud.“

“What kind of thing might Elliott Barker have seen on his visit to Kingsley Hall?“ I asked.

“Some rooms were, you know, beguilingly draped in Indian silks,“ Adrian said. “Schizophrenics like Ian Spurling“”who eventually became Freddie Mercury's costume designer“”would dance and sing and paint and recite poetry and rub shoulders with visiting freethinking celebrities like Timothy Leary and Sean Connery.“ Adrian paused. “And then there were other, less beguiling rooms, like Mary Barnes's shit room down in the basement.“

“Mary Barnes's shit room?“ I asked. “You mean like the worst room in the house?“

“I was seven when I first visited Kingsley Hall,“ Adrian said. “My father said to me, “˜There's a very special person down in the basement who wants to meet you.' So I went down there and the first thing I said was, “˜What's that smell of shit?'“

The smell of shit was“”Adrian told me“”coming from a chronic schizophrenic by the name of Mary Barnes. She represented a conflict at Kingsley Hall. Laing held madness in great esteem. He believed the insane possessed a special knowledge“”only they understood the true madness that permeated society. But Mary Barnes, down in the basement, hated being mad. It was agony for her, and she desperately wanted to be normal.

“And what about your father?“ I asked. “What was he like in the midst of all this?“ Adrian coughed.

“Well,“ he said, “the downside of having no barriers between doctors and patients was that everyone became a patient.“ There was a silence.

“When I envisaged Kingsley Hall, I imagined everyone becoming a doctor,“ I said. “I suppose I was feeling quite optimistic about humanity.“

“Nope,“ Adrian said. “Everyone became a patient. Kingsley Hall was very wild. There was an unhealthy respect for madness there. The first thing my father did was lose himself completely, go crazy, because there was a part of him that was totally fucking mad. In his case, it was a drunken, wild madness.“

“By the way,“ I said, “did they ever manage to formulate a successful shit policy?“

“Yes,“ Adrian said. “One of my dad's colleagues said, “˜She wants to paint with her shit. Maybe we should give her paints.' And it worked.“

Mary Barnes eventually became a celebrated and widely exhibited artist. Her paintings were greatly admired in the 1960s and 1970s for illustrating the mad, colorful, painful, exuberant, complicated inner life of a schizophrenic.

“And it got rid of the smell of shit,“ Adrian said.

And so he successfully sought permission from the Canadian government to obtain a large batch of LSD from a government-sanctioned lab, Connaught Laboratories, University of Toronto. He handpicked a group of psychopaths (“They have been selected on the basis of verbal ability and most are relatively young and intelligent offenders between seventeen and twenty-five,“ he explained in the October 1968 issue of the Canadian Journal of Corrections ); led them into what he named the Total Encounter Capsule, a small room painted bright green; and asked them to remove their clothes. This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world's first-ever marathon nude psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths.

So there I was, only eighteen at the time, I'd stolen a car so I wasn't exactly the criminal of the century, locked in a padded room for eleven days with a bunch of psychopaths, the lot of us high on scopolamine [a type of hallucinogenic] and they were all staring at me.“

“What did they say to you?“

“That they were there to help me.“

“What's your single most vivid memory of your days inside the program?“ I asked.

“I went in and out of delirium,“ Steve said. “One time, when I regained consciousness, I saw that they'd strapped me to Peter Woodcock.“

“Who's Peter Woodcock?“ I asked.

“Look him up on Wikipedia,“ he said.

Peter Woodcock (born March 5, 1939) is a Canadian serial killer and child rapist who murdered three young children in Toronto, Canada, in 1956 and 1957 when he was still a teenager. Woodcock was apprehended in 1957, declared legally insane and placed in Oak Ridge, an Ontario psychiatric facility located in Penetanguishene.

“”FROM WIKIPEDIA

I'd have them hold hands and say, “˜Let me experience my dream life in this community.' And then they would quietly go to sleep and dream.“ When they awoke, they'd head straight to the Dream Group, which consisted of an equal number of psychopaths and schizophrenics. “The problem,“ Gary said, “was that the schizophrenics had incredibly vivid dreams“”dream after dream after dream“”but the psychopaths would be lucky if they even had a dream.“

“Why do schizophrenics dream more than psychopaths?“ I asked.

“I don't know.“ Gary laughed. “I do remember the schizophrenics usually dreamed in color“”the more intense a dream, the more likely it's going to be in color“”but the psychopaths, if they managed to have a dream at all, dreamed in black-and-white.“ All this was creating a power imbalance. In regular group meetings, Gary said, the schizophrenics would be subservient to the psychopaths, “but suddenly the poor psychopaths had to sit and listen to the schizophrenics go on about dream one, dream two, dream three . . .“ When it was time for the patients to vote on whether to continue the Dream Group, the schizophrenics said yes, but the psychopaths vociferously argued against it and were victorious.

“Just because of the power struggle?“ I asked.

“Well, there was that,“ said Gary, “plus who wants to listen to some schizophrenic's boring dream?“

Gary asked me to consider what happens when any of us“”no matter what age we are“”go home to visit our parents at Christmas. It doesn't matter how wise and insightful adult life has made us. “Two days with your parents at Christmas and you'll all just be swatted back to the deepest level of the family's pathology.“ He had that exact same problem at Oak Ridge. “We'd give these guys LSD. They'd have these marathon weekends, and they'd change, but then they'd go back to a general ward that wasn't ready for the change. So they'd be swatted right back.“ Two steps forward, two steps back. If only the entire general ward“”every psychopath in the whole place“”could somehow achieve metaphysical enlightenment at the same time . . . And then it came to him: a mass LSD trip! It was radical but critical, the only way to break down the deep pathology of the ward. “I saw it as the culmination of all the stuff I had done,“ Gary said. “Give everyone the rite of passage of LSD at the same time. Or over a few days. Well, that was very upsetting for the security staff. They came into work and I said to them, “˜Just leave the guys alone.' “

Gary asked me to consider what happens when any of us“”no matter what age we are“”go home to visit our parents at Christmas. It doesn't matter how wise and insightful adult life has made us. “Two days with your parents at Christmas and you'll all just be swatted back to the deepest level of the family's pathology.“ He had that exact same problem at Oak Ridge. “We'd give these guys LSD. They'd have these marathon weekends, and they'd change, but then they'd go back to a general ward that wasn't ready for the change. So they'd be swatted right back.“

Two steps forward, two steps back. If only the entire general ward“”every psychopath in the whole place“”could somehow achieve metaphysical enlightenment at the same time . . . And then it came to him: a mass LSD trip! It was radical but critical, the only way to break down the deep pathology of the ward.

“I saw it as the culmination of all the stuff I had done,“ Gary said. “Give everyone the rite of passage of LSD at the same time. Or over a few days. Well, that was very upsetting for the security staff. They came into work and I said to them, “˜Just leave the guys alone.' “ And so the guards, bristling with anger and uncertainty, were forced to stand back as twenty-six serial killers and rapists ran around, en masse, off their heads on LSD. “I probably didn't play my cards properly there,“ Gary said. “I think the guards lost their identity. The union guys probably thought I was going to get people fired.“ A few days later Gary received the warning memo, and a few days after that he turned up for work to discover that his keys no longer fit the locks. The guards had changed them overnight. One told him“”from the other side of the bars“”that he was fired and he could never set foot in Oak Ridge again. “Oh well,“ Gary said now, pushing what was left of his breakfast across his plate. “I was ready to move on.“

In 1975 he organized a conference on the subject. “I invited the top people in the world who might have something to say about psychopaths,“ he said. “We ended up with eighty-five people. We took over a hotel in a ski resort near Saint Moritz called Les Arcs.“ It began disastrously, Bob said, with one psychiatrist standing up and dramatically announcing to the group his contention that Bob was himself a psychopath. A ripple of shock passed through the conference hall. Bob stood.

“Why do you believe that?“ he asked.

“You're clearly impulsive,“ replied the psychiatrist.

“You can't plan ahead. You invited me to participate as a speaker in this conference only a month ago.“

“I invited you only a month ago because the person I wanted to come couldn't come,“ Bob said.

“Oh, you're cold-blooded and callous,“ the psychiatrist said.

Some of the people listening in chuckled wryly. But there were skeptics here, too. Psychiatrists and psychologists and care workers and criminal profilers and neurologists tend not to like being told what to do by so-called gurus of the movement. I could feel in the room a sense of “Impress me.“

“One of my old buds from the FBI was investigating this woman, Karla Homolka,“ Bob had told me earlier. “She and her husband had videotaped themselves torturing and raping and murdering these young women. The police were taking her through the house where they'd cut up the bodies, carved them up, and Karla was saying, “˜My sister would like that rug . . .' They took her into the bathroom and Karla was saying, “˜Can I ask you something? I had a bottle of perfume here . . .' Totally disconnected. It was stunning.“ Bob said it's always a nice surprise when a psychopath speaks openly about their inability to feel emotions. Most of them pretend to feel. When they see us non-psychopaths crying or scared or moved by human suffering, or whatever, they think it's fascinating. They study us and learn how to ape us, like space creatures trying to blend in, but if we keep our eyes open, we can spot the fakery. “What happened to Karla Homolka in the end?“ I asked him. “She's out now,“ he said. “They believed her little-girl act. Hair in braids. All sweet and lovely. Very convincing. She blamed it all on her husband. She did a plea bargain. They gave her twelve years.“ Item 5: Conning/Manipulative. Item 4: Pathological Lying“”An individual for whom lying is a characteristic part of interactions with others.

[...] psychopaths tend to gravitate toward the bright lights. You'll find lots of them in New York and London and Los Angeles. The psychologist David Cooke, of the Glasgow Centre for the Study of Violence, was once asked in Parliament if psychopaths caused particular problems in Scottish prisons.

“Not really,“ he replied. “They're all in London prisons.“

As we gathered together our belongings and headed toward our cars, I said to one attendee, “You have to feel sorry for psychopaths, right? If it's all because of their amygdalae? If it's not their fault?“

“Why should we feel sorry for them?“ he replied. “They don't give a shit about us.“

“I came to you,“ I said, “because of this guy called Tony. He's in Broadmoor. He says they're falsely accusing him of psychopathy and he hopes I'll do some campaigning journalism to support his release. And I do have warm feelings for Tony, I really do, but how do I know if he's a psychopath?“

Bob didn't seem to be listening. It was as if the crash had made him introspective. He said, almost to himself, “I should never have done all my research in prisons. I should have spent my time inside the Stock Exchange as well.“

I looked at Bob. “Really?“ I said. He nodded. “But surely stock-market psychopaths can't be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths,“ I said.

“Serial killers ruin families.“ Bob shrugged. “Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.“

“What if the wife of a psychopath reads this?“ I asked. “What should she do? Leave?“

“Yes,“ said Martha. “I would like to say leave. You're not going to hurt someone's feelings because there are no feelings to hurt.“ She paused. “Sociopaths love power. They love winning. If you take loving kindness out of the human brain, there's not much left except the will to win.“

“Which means you'll find a preponderance of them at the top of the tree?“ I said.

“Yes,“ she said. “The higher you go up the ladder, the greater the number of sociopaths you'll find there.“

“So the wars, the injustices, the exploitation, all of these things occur because of that tiny percent of the population up there who are mad in this certain way?“ I asked. It sounded like the ripple effect of Petter Nordlund's book, but on a giant scale.

“I think a lot of these things are initiated by them,“ she said. “It is a frightening and huge thought,“ I said, “that the ninety-nine percent of us wandering around down here are having our lives pushed and pulled around by that psychopathic fraction up there.“

“It is a large thought,“ she said. “It is a thought people don't have very often. Because we're raised to believe that deep down everyone has a conscience.“ At the end of our conversation she turned to address you, the reader. She said if you're beginning to feel worried that you may be a psychopath, if you recognize some of those traits in yourself, if you're feeling a creeping anxiety about it, that means you are not one.

I wrote to him, fully expecting a refusal. Talking to me would, after all, have violated the terms of his release. Once the authorities found out, he could well have been arrested, deported back to Haiti, and executed. Prospective interviewees tend to turn me down for a lot less than that. Many decline my interview requests simply because they think I might portray them as a little crazy. Nonetheless, he cheerfully agreed to meet me. I didn't ask why because I was just glad to get the interview and“”if I'm honest“”I didn't really worry about what would happen to him as a result, which I suppose is a little Item 6: Lack of Remorse or Guilt, Item 7: Shallow Affect, and Item 8: Callous/Lack of Empathy, but he was a death-squad leader, so who cares?

Just then I looked up. Something had changed in the room. Prisoners and their loved ones were bristling, anxiously noticing something I hadn't noticed. “This is fucked up,“ Toto whispered.

“What is?“

“That guy.“ Without taking his eyes off me, Toto indicated a prison guard“”a man wearing a white shirt“”who was wandering the room. “He's a sadist,“ he said. “When he walks into a room, everyone gets scared. None of us want trouble. We all just want to go home.“

“Did he just do something?“

“Not really. He told a woman that her T-shirt was too revealing. That's all.“

I glanced over. It was the woman I had met in the shelter. She was looking upset.

“It's just . . . he scares people,“ he said.

We had lunch before I left. Al seemed in surprisingly high spirits for a man who'd just been questioned on which psychopathic traits most applied to him. He had a little gold ax on his lapel. As we ate, he told me funny stories about firing people. Each was essentially the same: someone was lazy and he fired them with an amusing quip. For instance, one lazy Sunbeam executive mentioned to him that he'd just bought himself a fabulous sports car. “You may have a fancy sports car,“ Al replied, “but I'll tell you what you don't have. A job!“ Judy laughed at each of the anecdotes, though she had surely heard them many times, and I realized what a godsend to a corporation a man who enjoys firing people must be.

I wrote in my notepad, and then turned to a clean page so they wouldn't spot my thoughts, Feeling no remorse must be a blessing when all you have left are your memories.

She said she didn't stop to consider why some sorts of madness were better than others: “I just knew on an innate level who would make good television. We all did. Big Brother. The X Factor. American Idol. Wife Swap . . . Wife Swap is particularly bad because you're monkeying with people's families, with their children. You've got some loop-the-loop stranger yelling at someone's children. The producers spend three weeks with them, pick the bits that are mad enough, ignore the bits that aren't mad enough, and then leave.“

David had, like I had, walked down Tottenham Court Road a million times. It is unremarkable: discount electrical shops and Time Out magazine. The last thing you'd expect is some parallel spook universe unfolding just behind some unmarked door.

“What questions did he ask you?“ I said.

“Whether I had any religious beliefs when I was twelve. How I formed my political beliefs through my teenage years. What had been the milestones on my journey? What were the points in my life when I believed I'd done something useful? It was of a much higher level than a normal job interview. He asked me about the ethics of intelligence. He kept saying, “˜Why do you think you're here?' I didn't want to say it. I didn't want to look like an idiot. But he kept asking the question. Finally I said, “˜Is it MI5?' He said, “˜Of course it is.'“

It was a surprisingly small turnout. David was sitting in the center of a circle, dressed in flowing white robes, looking slim and well. There were only two journalists in attendance“”someone from Sky News and me. Everyone else seemed to be old friends from the truth movement. They looked embarrassed. The man from Sky News told me he was here to interview David but they had no intention to broadcast it. The plan was to get it in the can and then put it on the shelf, “in case something happens in the future.“ There was no doubting that the “something“ he was alluding to would be something truly awful.

A lot of people are scared they're going mad. Late at night, after a few drinks, they admit it. One or two of my friends swear they don't mind. One woman I know says she secretly wills a nervous breakdown on so she can get admitted to a psychiatric hospital, away from the tensions of modern life, where she'll be able to have long lie-ins and be looked after by nurses. But most of my friends do mind, they say. It scares them. They just want to be normal. I'm one of them, forever unpleasurably convinced my wife is dead because I can't reach her on the phone, letting out involuntary yelps on claustrophobic Ryanair flights, becoming debilitatingly anxious that psychopaths might want to kill me. And we spend our evenings watching Wife Swap and Come Dine with Me and Supernanny and the early rounds of X Factor and Big Brother. TV is just troubled people being booed these days.

There's a load of films being made where filmmakers go to a council estate and 90 percent of the people there are functional“”getting their kids ready for school, paying their taxes, working. And 10 percent are dysfunctional“”and they go, “That's what we're going to make a film about.“ “”ACTOR EDDIE MARSAN, INTERVIEWED BY JONATHAN ROMNEY IN The Independent, MAY 2, 2010

Gary Maier“”the psychiatrist who invented the dream workshops and the chanting rituals at Oak Ridge and was eventually fired for giving LSD to twenty-six psychopaths simultaneously“”was recently invited for lunch by some drug company reps. He works at two maximum-security prisons in Madison, Wisconsin, now and his department had just made the decision to have nothing more to do with the drug companies. So a few of the reps invited him for lunch to find out why. “It was two beautiful women and a pretty nice guy,“ Gary told me after the lunch was over. “What did they say?“ I asked him. “Well, if you look for me on the Internet, you'll find essays I've written about Indian effigy mounds,“ he replied. “They're my hobby. So the two beautiful women spent most of the lunch asking me about effigy mounds. They had me drawing pictures of effigies on the tablecloth.“ “And then what?“ I asked. “Then they got down to it,“ he said. “Why wasn't I using their products? I said, “˜You guys are the enemy. You've hijacked the profession. You're only interested in selling your products, not in treating patients.' They all had a run at me. I held my ground. Then the bill came. We were ready to go. And then the more attractive of the two women said, “˜Oh! Would you like some Viagra samples?'“ Gary fell silent. Then he said, with some fury, “Like street pushers.“

When Robert Spitzer stepped down as editor of DSM-III, his position was taken by a psychiatrist named Allen Frances. He continued the Spitzer tradition of welcoming as many new mental disorders, with their corresponding checklists, into the fold as he could. DSM-IV came in at 886 pages. Now, as he took a road trip from New York down to Florida, Dr. Frances told me over the phone he felt they'd made some terrible mistakes. “It's very easy to set off a false epidemic in psychiatry,“ he said. “And we inadvertently contributed to three that are ongoing now.“

“Which are they?“ I asked.

“Autism, attention deficit, and childhood bipolar,“ he said.

“How did you do it?“ I asked.

“With autism it was mostly adding Asperger's, which was a much milder form,“ he said.

“The rates of diagnosis of autistic disorder in children went from less than one in two thousand to more than one in one hundred. Many kids who would have been called eccentric, different, were suddenly labeled autistic.“

I remembered my drive to Coxsackie Correctional Facility, passing that billboard near Albany“”EVERY 20 SECONDS A CHILD IS DIAGNOSED WITH AUTISM. Some parents came to wrongly believe that this sudden, startling outbreak was linked to the MMR vaccine. Doctors like Andrew Wakefield and celebrities like Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey promoted the view. Parents stopped giving the vaccine to their children. Some caught measles and died.

But this chaos, Allen Frances said, pales next to childhood bipolar. “The way the diagnosis is being made in America was not something we intended,“ he said. “Kids with extreme irritability and moodiness and temper tantrums are being called bipolar. The drug companies and the advocacy groups have a tremendous influence in propagating the epidemic.“

When I asked Robert Spitzer about the possibility that he'd inadvertently created a world in which some ordinary behaviors were being labeled mental disorders, he fell silent. I waited for him to answer. But the silence lasted three minutes. Finally he said, “I don't know.“

“Do you ever think about it?“ I asked him.

“I guess the answer is I don't really,“ he said.

“Maybe I should. But I don't like the idea of speculating how many of the DSM-III categories are describing normal behavior.“

“Why don't you like speculating on that?“ I asked.

“Because then I'd be speculating on how much of it is a mistake,“ he said. There was another long silence. “Some of it may be,“ he said.

“What will you do now?“ I asked.

“Maybe move to Belgium,“ he said. “There's this woman I fancy. But she's married. I'll have to get her divorced.“

“Well, you know what they say about psychopaths,“ I said.

“We're manipulative!“ said Tony.

In early January 2011, not long after he sent me an Xmas text (“Friends are the fruit cake of life“”some nutty, some soaked in alcohol, some sweet“) Tony was released from Bethlem.