The ultimate ebullient self-publicist, Piers Morgan has followed up his first scandalous volume of media gossip with, well, more of the same, except this time he’s become the telly-hungry celebrity he used to despise. It’s hard to blame him - The Insider was a riotous success - but has he got enough stories to sustain another book of tittle tattle?

Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard finds Morgan “admirably clear-eyed about his public image”. At the beginning of the book, no longer a newspaper editor, Morgan is unsure exactly who he is. Curtis finds the account of his, ahem, self-discovery: “half-arrogant, half-self-deprecating, wholly entertaining.”

Morgan himself has said: ''I don't pretend to be any great literary genius, I just try to provide knock-about entertaining diaries,” but Teddy Jamieson in The Herald points out that, sadly, he just doesn’t knock about with the right people any more: “Morgan's problem is a simple one. Despite the subtitle, he's no longer much of an insider. He doesn't get invited for dinner at Number 10 any more, his only access to the world of celebrity comes through showbiz parties … So unless you want to know what goes on behind the scenes of America's Got Talent (ie, what the Hoff has said today) or what Kate Moss looks like when partying (the answer being, "She looked tiny, pimply, wide-eyed and with a nose like Danniella Westbrook's") there's not a lot of revelations to be had here and those there are mostly come in the shape of rehashes of his GQ interviews.”

Rebecca Seal in The Observer finds the book a jolly enough romp: “This book isn't going to have the same kind of impact The Insider did, but none the less, it's enjoyably revelatory and very good fun, whatever you may think of the man himself.” Lynn Barber in the Telegraph also strikes an indulgent tone: “ … he is a very funny writer. You don't have to like him, you just have to laugh at him. It is easily done.”

So, the press (and it is the “quality” papers that have given this book the column inches) seems to conclude that it’s all good fun with an appropriate smidgen of humility.

And what of the blogs? Harry Phibbs from on the Social Affairs Unit website has rather less patience with everyone’s favourite enfant terrible: “It still reads like a child has written it but the difference is that the child has gone into a sulk. He wonders around America presenting some ghastly pop music talent competition agonising over the ratings - and when high ratings figures come through worrying why people don't seem to recognise him in the street.”

Despite his much less starry subject matter, Morgan still seems to have the knack for making even intellectual types want to read at least a few chapters. The author Susan Hill noted it in her ‘books bought’ and found it: “scandalous goss. great fun.” Tory blogger Iain Dale was slavering over it: “He has an engaging, and rather vulnerable, writing style and no matter how much you feel you should hate him, you end up thinking 'good on him'. He admits he's arrogant, rude, self obsessed and hungry for celebrity, but this doesn't stop him having a go at people who are just as flawed.

"He's on a journey seeking to understand the modern day concept of celebrity and ends up being enveloped within its stifling confines.”

However he passes his days now, as a tabloid editor Morgan was second to none. He seems to have lost none of his instinct for telling stories which even - and maybe especially - the posh and brainy cannot help but gobble up like canapés at a party.

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