Newsnight Review discussed Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star Crossed child in the final days of the American Century by Hunter S Thompson.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

PAUL MORLEY:
I think it's incredible, in his 60s, having done what he has done, that he has even got the stamina, under whatever duress he was under, that he managed to deliver this book. I remember when Kerouac delivered his early books, he would write them on one, long piece of paper that went on forever. I got the feeling that Thompson delivered this on a series of toilet doors. The kind of scratchings on the back of toilet doors, very abusive. Fantastic when he gets going, a bit repetitive, a bit annoying. It's a fantastic sign. He keeps going on and on about America being a fascist country, and it's fabulous that he does that with such viciousness. But the paradox is, how can it be a fascist country if people like that are allowed to say it's a fascist country. Yet, they are, and it's fantastic to see him. We don't really have an equivalent over here.

KIRSTY WARK:
I don't think anyone else in print must have called George Bush a "whore beast".

PAUL MORLEY:
No, and worse, and the fact that he can get away with it. But somehow, they allow him to get away with it, as if to point out that it isn't a fascist country, because they let people like that get away with it. It's a bit of a shame in a way, but it's fantastic that journalists like that exist. There is nowhere, these days, for them to go, so they are an ageing beast, which is such a shame.

ALKARIM JIVANI:
The drug he is really addicted to is testosterone, so we have all the kinds of stories about the hard-fighting. We have this ridiculous self-aggrandising story about how a mountain lion jumps into his car, and he fights it off literally single-handedly, because he's driving with the other hand. It's crazy. The anachronism of it is that, basically, he is a hard-drinking, fast-living man who has outlived his time.

KIRSTY WARK:
Yes, but he still has things to say about politics. The problem is he actually doesn't say them lucidly enough, and doesn't dwell enough on that. He does throw-away lines on Bush, he doesn't really develop that theme.

JUDE KELLY:
This is a bit like one of those sausages you get, where you think they've put lots of meat in, and scraps off the table, and put it all inside a sausage. It's a very interesting sausage in that respect, because he has got an amazing mind, but it is raddled. I agree with you, it's whatever leftovers he fancied scraping off his typewriter. But that doesn't make it not interesting, because he is such a fertile creator of controversy.

PAUL MORLEY:
If that's what he wants to do, then we have to pay attention.

JUDE KELLY:
He quotes from other people in here, interestingly, from Dylan, saying, "Those who are not busy born are busy dying." I thought that this was a book that was a reaction against the fact that he's suddenly thought, "My God, I am busy dying." He talks about politics as the art of controlling your environment, and lashes back like a lion, not quite dead, and says, "I must talk about America." One of the most interesting things, for me, about the book, is the way he discusses drugs. He talks about the fact that drugs and alcohol have allowed him to stay idealistic. In other words, against the kind of terrible corruption that he sees, that he has witnessed all over America, Cuba, everywhere, he needed drugs so that he could carry on seeing truth for what it was. It's not a way I could live, but I understood, really for the first time, that his version of staying honest, to beating out corruption on his typewriter again and again, was to say, "I have to stay crazy, so I am able to witness relative madness." That was enlightening.

PAUL MORLEY:
In all sorts of ways. We get these little vomits, these expulsions of this hope that he can maintain truth, and also a desperation, I think you are right, that he is out of his time. It must be awful for someone who was so on his time to be out of it, and know it.

ALKARIM JIVANI:
Didn't you also feel that, in some sense, the outlaw had joined the establishment? For instance, outlaws like that don't survive long enough to write rambling memoirs with pompous forewords, which compared this to Einstein's memoirs, which is rather ludicrous. In order to survive long enough to be given the keys to the home town, Louisville, Kentucky in this case. Or show hilarious pictures of him playing golf.