There was, relatively speaking, someone already famous at this show, passionate local TV personality Tony Wilson, obsessed with Manchester's pioneering and progressive credentials.
Is she a bit of a small-c conservative about sex? "If you know my personality, I'm obsessed with romance and sex and sexy situations, but I believe it's as an outsider looking in, because I don't have access to a lot of it".
Aliens, out this week from Picador, proceeds in the way that one imagines that Fermi's conversation at Los Alamos might have: serious scientists, in occasionally cheeky dialogue with one another, acknowledging that the question they're pursuing—Is anybody out there?—has long been pursued by kookier personalities, conspiracy theorists obsessed with Area 51, and alien abductions.
And the media is obsessed with personality.
They provide glimpses into the personality of a man obsessed with a sorority that he first encountered while an undergraduate, asserting in an e-mail message that the women's group was waging a "fatwah" against him.
Paradoxically it is that great enemy of the Frankfurt school, Breivik, who is the perfect example of the authoritarian personality Adorno wrote about: obsessed with the apparent decline of traditional standards, unable to cope with change, trapped in a hatred of all those not deemed part of the in-group and prepared to take action to "defend" tradition against degeneracy.
I'm obsessed with obsessions.
British newspapers have always been obsessed with criminal personalities, and this book is a spirited collection of the best and most famous tales.
According to Amazon's bestseller lists, Brits "buy books by television personalities [and] Americans are obsessed with self-improvement" … Can two former male models make "organic, multi-grain granolas" a bestseller?
In real life, Mae West was equally obsessed with the public personality she had created, but she wasn't nuts.
