Elias Canetti, the Nobel Prize-winning author of this book, would be unhappy to learn that he's now best known as Iris Murdoch's one-time lover. I had heard that he was the prototype of the diabolical Julius King in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, and I'd also read various lurid accounts of their affair...
A long-term dipping-into book. Recommended on a blog by Charles Lemos, at [now defunct] bythefault.com. Goes deeper and wider than Hoffer's "True Believer."Trivia: Canetti is thought to have been Iris Murdoch's model for The Black Prince.