There are passages that can only make you squirm - mawkish celebrations of botty-whipping, encomiums to the anus - but the book's relentless self-portrait of an intellectual dandy falling apart from inside would be incomplete without them.
A relentless hype man, he passed out portraits of himself wearing a top hat and opera glasses in a balloon basket — "the balloonist as aerial flaneur," Holmes writes, "gentleman of the upper air, a voyageur extraordinaire".
As a portrait of the sixties, this relentless satire of revolutionary action serves to justify the course of Allen's own ideas and activity, even as he hints at admiration for the fervor and daring of the revolutionaries themselves.
From the Mojave Desert to the Australian Outback to Greenland's icy expanses, she captures portraits of life forms so relentless they've managed to survive eons of planetary change.
Gone, too, is the portrait of the American Communist as an innocent victim of relentless government persecution.
Chang's fine prose and her keen sense of detail more than compensate for the occasional digression, and her book is an intimate portrait of a strange and hidden landscape, "a universe of relentless motion".
Something about how "the relentless focus on ongoing problems at the expense of a more nuanced portrait of [Africa], is obscuring the progress that is being made towards a more secure and prosperous future".
And, paradoxical as it may sound, reading your portrait of my colleagues' difficulties with demanding parents and trustees, relentless fund-raising and assaults on their status confirms my view.
Donald Glover's newest album as Childish Gambino, "Because the Internet," is a self-aware portrait of a young man isolated by technology, celebrity and relentless introspection.
Most of them are portraits, made after the late nineteen-forties, which pay relentless attention to the sitters' heads.
