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It took me a while to work out that Raoul Duke the antihero and authorial alias of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas wasn’t really intended as a role model. Some kids want to be footballers, some want to be commandos. When I was a teenager, the drug-fueled excesses of Fear and Loathing were the only model of machismo that I could really believe in. But unless you’re as undeniably talented and charismatic as Thompson was – and I never was – behaving like a drunk, drugged madman is neither entertaining nor endearing. It takes all of Thompson’s skills as a writer to transform his train-wreck Las Vegas tales into the riveting and engaging story it is. It has a wild, unhinged machismo that tendsto strike a chord in the male psyche.

As I’ve got older, reading Fear and Loathing has become less comfortable. It’s very definitely a product of early 70s America, and Nixon, though only mentioned a couple of times, hangs over the book like a bad hangover. Thompson makes a persausive case that the only way to cope with the failure the liberalism of the 1960s was to engage in such excess that it wouldn’t hurt any more. At its heart there’s a deep despair, one that’s still be relevant today.

It’s not quite as fun to read now, though the dazzling acrobatics of its prose is still enjoyable if you can ignore the legions of journalists who have tried (and failed) to imitate it.

Panic. It crept up my spine like the first rising vibes of an acid frenzy. All these horrible realities began to dawn on me: Here I was all alone in Las Vegas with this goddamn incredibly expensive car, completely twisted on drugs, no attorney, no cash, no story for the magazine – and on top of everything else I had a gigantic goddamn hotel bill to deal with. We had ordered everything into that room that human hands could carry – including about six hundred bars of translucent Neutrogena soap.