[2] Diski was a regular contributor to the London Review of Books; the collections Don't and A View from the Bed include articles and essays written for the publication.

She won the 2003 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America With Interruptions.

[5] At the same time, she immersed herself deeply in the culture of the 60s, from the Aldermaston marches to the Grosvenor Square Protests of 1968, from drugs to free love, from jazz to acid rock,[6][7] and a flirtation with the ideas and methods of R. D.

[2][10] Compared at times with her mentor Lessing as both were concerned with the thinking woman, Diski was called a post-postmodernist for her abiding distrust of logical systems of thought, whether postmodern or not.

"[13][14] In The Sixties, Diski described her experience as a young woman starting out in life: "I lived in London during that period, regretting the Beats, buying clothes, going to movies, dropping out, reading, taking drugs, spending time in mental hospitals, demonstrating, having sex, teaching".

[15] She also described the decade's pervasive sexism, institutionalised in the countercultural cult of casual sex, asserting that "On the basis that no means no, I was raped several times by men who arrived in my bed and wouldn't take no for an answer".

[16] In the book, Diski returns repeatedly to the question of how far the cult of the self in the permissive society gave rise to 1980s neoliberalism, greed and self-interest.

Kirkus Reviews comments that "Antarctica is not so much a destination as a symptom in this intense, disturbing memoir of a wickedly unpleasant childhood."

She rejects the usual "cancer clichés", instead going back to her time with Lessing, meeting other famous literary figures including Robert Graves, Alan Sillitoe, Lindsay Anderson, and R. D. Laing.