Recuperating after an almost lethal bout of tuberculosis contracted in his twenties, the Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) wrote that he had ‘discovered my method of working, my own brand of infamy, my particular form of brutality, my own idiosyncratic taste’. It was a method that from the start made him Austria’s literary hair shirt. In novel after novel and play after play, in form mostly a series of monologues frequently by and about thinly disguised friends and acquaintances, Bernhard excoriated his homeland’s hypocrisy and provincialism. To his critics he was, in that wonderful German word a Nestbeschmutzer, a fouler of his nest. Ironically, the more he positioned himself as an outsider the more he was showered with honours and prizes. He was even, briefly, offered the directorship of the Burgtheater in Vienna. But his work always continued to explore a people who had still not completely adjusted to their Hapsburg and Nazi legacies. His hated rival, Peter Handke, wrote a play Offending the Audience (1966). Bernhard went him one better and insulted a nation.