This second volume of Sontag’s journals and notebooks traces her evolution from fledgling participant in the artistic and intellectual world in 1960s New York City to a dominant force in the world of ideas. This is an invaluable record of one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century.

‘A powerful self-portrait emerges. In its fragmentation . . . and passion, its combination of the erudite and the everyday, it is more true to life, both intellectual and emotional, than the most artful novel or careful biography. It may well be that Sontag’s diaries will come to be seen as just as brilliant and important as anything she wrote’ Sunday Telegraph