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An interesting thought is trying to reach us here, but the ghost of the literary burns it away, leaving only its remainder: a nicely constructed sentence, rich in sound and syntax, signifying (almost) nothing. Netherland doesn't really want to know about misapprehension. It wants to offer us the authentic story of a self. But is this really what having a self feels like? Do selves always seek their good, in the end? Are they never perverse? Do they always want meaning? Do they not sometimes want its opposite? And is this how memory works? Do our childhoods often return to us in the form of coherent, lyrical reveries? Is this how time feels? Do the things of the world really come to us like this, embroidered in the verbal fancy of times past? Is this really Realism?

Q. You write about the importance of collaboration in this new age. Tell us more.

A. Most especially for younger RenGen, their agenda is to collaborate, to connect and to create. They don’t respond to directive. They respond to teaming — where a boss puts a question or problem on the table and everyone can jump in. This isn’t easy. It can be frustrating to get things done this way.

One thing is certain: the appetite for print is growing. In 1996, there were between 60,000 and 100,000 new titles in the UK each year. By 2007, it was pushing 200,000. That's the biggest annual output of any country in the Western world, turning over some £4bn a year.

All this has been fuelled by an explosive mixture of global commerce and technology. In simple terms, you could say that Amazon plus Microsoft equals a new literary stratosphere. Two things complicate this equation. First, despite the steady evolution from typesetting to digitisation, the printed book has held out against electronic options. It is as if, after lift-off, the Apollo mission turned out to be not a space capsule but a Spitfire.

When Judith Rich Harris reported the same information about the genetic
origins of personality in her pioneering book The Nurture Assumption (1998)
and then developed a richly complex theory about the origins of individual
differences in No Two Alike (2007), readers understood that we are in the
midst of a revolution in understanding of what makes us the way we are.
Daniel Nettle, in contrast, has written an engaging primer on the genetics
of personality, but he does not fully examine the implications of this work
for child rearing, parent-blaming, literary analysis, memoir, psychotherapy
and human hubris. Were he to have done so, readers would have more deeply
felt the impact and consequences of coming to the end of the Freudian story,
and of being at the exhilarating start of a new one.

"The real story is people arriving here almost with nothing, who built lives, built families, built a large part of the urban part of the country - street-paving, sidewalks, subways - and decided to embrace the country," said Puleo.