When Odysseus has returned home and killed his wife's suitors he is not accepted by Penelope until he describes how his bed was hewn from an unmoveable olive tree at the heart of his house.
"But what if his heart takes him places you don't want to go?" Throughout most of the story, Jack's voice is Dockers-casual, affable and self-deprecating, until he describes the climactic fight with his son that has cost him his family.
Until recently, he described himself in Who's Who as a "financial executive," and, indeed, he looks like a bookkeeper — tall, thin, with an austere face, in which severe eyes peer unblinkingly from behind thick glasses.
Until recently he described himself as an ex-designer (though we'll go into that later) and all of his work questions the relevance of the traditional design process to contemporary life.
It was Coalition ministers who decided on a huge and rapid expansion of the test, in May 2011, to re-assess 1.5m existing incapacity benefit claimants, despite apparent warnings from their own expert advisor, Professor Malcolm Harrington, that the rollout should be delayed until what he described as an "inhumane and mechanistic" test could be further refined.
That's why I had an adviser who would tell me if something I was doing wasn't cool". Stevens first thought about acting when he moved to New York from Chicago at 13. Up until then he described himself as a sports fanatic.
For a time, on Thursday nights, the bookshop hosted weekly meetings of the staff of the New Inquiry, the lefty Web magazine, until Michael had what he described as a falling-out with the editors.
In his radio blog, he described sleeping until 6 a.m.
Cheek, an Olympic gold medalist in speed skating, talked about being disenchanted with competition – "skating fast in circles" as he described it – until he realized he could use his celebrity for a greater good.
He decides that he will set himself to describing every instant of his life, and until he has described them all he will no longer think about being dead.
