Will Self became a ubiquitous presence in London media circles in the 1990s. During the British general election campaign of 1997 he was alleged to have taken heroin in the toilet of Prime Minster John Major's plane. He initially denied the allegation but then admitted it, and shortly afterward he lost his job with the London Observer. While Self's drug use was hardly a secret, this high-profile incident lent him an additional notoriety. As a result, many of his books are reviewed as if their main subject were drugs and drug addiction, regardless of whether that is actually the case.

This bias on the part of reviewers is unfortunate, since Self is much more than a chronicler of the drug culture: a great satirist of middle England, he offers in his work the kind of debunking of sacred cows that makes him a cult hit with the disaffected children...