Pete Clark
Not Recommended
The Proud Highway: The Fear and Loathing Letters, Volume One
By Hunter S Thompson
Bloomsbury 685pp £20 order from our bookshop
Like most people of my approximate age and general outlook, I fell upon a book called Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when it appeared in 1971 and devoured it at a single sitting. These were early days in university and people hobbled around campus with Lord of the Rings in their smelly bags. Hunter S Thompson's brief and furious work blew away the hobbits and all their pothead pixie friends for ever.
Here was a man who had so many drugs that he had to keep most of them in the boot of his car. In the telling of his hilariously anti-Establishment tale, Thompson did not draw one uncrazed breath, setting a new benchmark in bad behaviour. How we growled at our
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'He is persuaded by the idea that coffee, the most widely used psychoactive substance in the world, changed 18th-century European minds, catalysing a new material rationalism.'
@ajlees on Michael Pollan's new book, 'This is Your Mind on Plants'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/never-mind-the-neurobollocks
'A publicist interviewed by Fairrie praises Collins and her heroines ... because these were "women who behaved like men". Is that supposed to be good, given how men behaved towards Collins?'
Peter Conrad reviews a new documentary about Jackie Collins.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/easy-writer
'Walk down your supermarket pet food aisle and you’ll be hard pressed to find a single brand that claims to be made with high-welfare meat. More expensive pet food should not be about spoiling our cats but about sparing the farmed beasts we feed them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/meattoo