First published in 1822,  de Quincey’s best-known work is still in print. Though seemingly offering the reader poignant memories, temporal digressions and random anecdotes, the Confessions is a work of great sophistication and rated as one of the most impressive and influential of all autobiographies. He evidences a nervous self-awareness as he scrutinises his own life in an effort to answer that eternal question: Who am I?  The horrors of addiction are not a large part of the whole yet in its day it was regarded as a ‘lucrative piece of sensational journalism, albeit published in a more intellectually respectable organ’ ( London Magazine). Written in an almost romantic, self-reflective neo-classical style it still today reaches out to the reader.