Paul Sayer’s “The Absolution Game” looks at the pressures on social care professionals - an all too vital overlooked by novelists and policy makers alike.

147 – “I’m cosseting my passivity, treating myself to my humiliation, smiling, thinking of my whole ridiculous history, of my family, gathered before my open believing eyes, the events that have buoyed me up here in this exquisitely lonely present, the undeniable present: Duff, Roycott, Maisie, Brittain, the thousand others whose lives I have tainted, they’re all here, the crowd appalled by my laughter, baying my name, coming for me, tripping me up, laying into me, fist after fist, boot upon boot, but they can’t hurt me.  Nothing hurts me now.  I’m easy sport.  So easy they can’t touch me.  Because there’s no one here.  I’m no one now.”