Sometimes he was vegan detoxed studying Zen and doing yoga or he would marinade himself in Jack

Sometimes he was vegan, detoxed, studying Zen and doing yoga; or he would marinade himself in Jack Daniels and stay roaring drunk for weeks, vacuuming drugs (magic mushrooms were his favourite) and chain-smoking. As one of his oldest friends put it, “I can’t figure out if he is near enlightenment or a black beast. He’s a genius and a putz and a child and a Master all in one.”Hicks started young, regurgitating Woody Allen routines for friends and family, but he got original fast. By his mid-teens, he was packing nightclubs before he was legally able to drink in them. His conservative Texas Baptist upbringing provided him with a ready-made source of home-grown material. Like Bruce and Pryor, he opened himself up onstage, exposing his own contradictions and forging a dialectic between his high-minded vision and his sex-drugs-and-rock’n'roll appetites. One moment the philosopher, the next the lascivious sex-addict “Goat Boy”, he took listeners on a roller-coaster ride through himself.Also like Bruce and Pryor, he had his very own Mini-Me in the form of Denis Leary, who co-opted not only Hicks’s black-clad, splenetic, smoke-wreathed persona, but some of his best lines.

Leary is to Hicks as Eddie Murphy was to Pryor: younger, better-looking, louder and less complex; setting his artistic sights far lower, but commercially more successful.The irony didn’t escape Hicks, who knew that there was a lot more to being an authentic radical than being offensive. His work was genuinely challenging, and despite his leftish slant, PC liberals could not expect an easy ride. His 1991 show Relentless contained an attack on working-class single mothers which would not have been out of place in a Jim Davidson set.Cynthia True, comedy critic for the New York edition of Time Out, never interviewed Bill Hicks, but this book is no mere cut-and-paste job. She has met colleagues, relatives and old friends, one of whom provided her with the intensely revealing answering-machine messages from Hicks which serve as epigraphs for each chapter. Conscientious, perceptive and affectionate, this book demonstrates that she understands her subject perfectly. Hicks’s final view on life was that “It’s just a ride.” Full of thrills, spills and chills, his own ride was a scary and exhilarating one.Why, Hicks once mused, did the mass media never carry any positive stories about drugs? “Wouldn’t that be newsworthy? Just once? ‘Today a young man on acid realised that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration and that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There’s no such thing as death, life is only a dream and you are the imagination of yourself Here’s Tom with the weather.’”.

With their frank descriptions of homosexual exploits and carefully noted payments to rent boys, the papers were just what British intelligence needed to disgrace the Irish nationalist Sir Roger Casement and send him to the gallows. Berlin pulled out of an agreement to send troops at the last minute.Following his conviction for treason in London, extracts from the diaries were sent to senior figures in the British establishment, ranging from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.The lurid references to homosexual sex, including observations on the size of his lovers’ genitals, saw pleas for clemency diminish to almost nothing. Casement was hanged at Pentonville Prison in London on 3 August 1916.A working group headed by Goldsmiths College, London University, compared Casement’s musings with other documents known to have been written by him. Analysis of the ink used and variation in the pen stroke and handwriting characteristics, using microscopes and video cameras, proved that only Casement could have written the diaries, a press conference was told.