The Ten Types of Human: A New Understanding of Who We Are, and Who We Can Be

by Dexter Dias

Where there are gaps in the account or for reasons of confidentiality and/or security I have had to find a substitute, my approach has been informed by that of John Berendt in the seminal Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which is to combine the ‘strict non-fiction’ (his term) with elements constructed with the intention of remaining, as Berendt puts it, ‘faithful to the characters and to the essential drift of events’, but those are acts, it is essential to emphasise, that necessarily draw on both the inquisitional and imaginative faculties, concisely described by John le Carré (in a different context) as an exercise in ‘blending experience with imagination’. Thus some parts are necessarily a fictive reimagining of certain events grounded in the best available evidence. When done, this has been with the clear objective of protecting the personal safety of a contributor or preserving their privacy.