Agate's style in the diary entries that constitute the nine volumes of "Ego" is discursive. Anecdotes of the day's news, excerpts from his voluminous correspondence with readers of his reviews and books, frank and often amusing ruminations on his health (he was a hypochondriac and obsessive-compulsive) and poor financial state abound. Many of his diary entries mention his friends Herbert Van Thal, George Lyttelton, Dent and Pavia, and Edward Agate, his much-loved brother. He had recurring themes around Malibran, Sarah Bernhardt, Réjane, Rachel, the Dreyfus Affair, Shakespeare, and Dickens. His style is "vigorous and outspoken, and always entertaining, in spite of his refusal to admit greatness in any actor later than Irving." He has been compared to critics of an earlier generation, Clement Scott and A B Walkley: "He admired the power Scott had enjoyed on the "Daily Telegraph" during the last third of the nineteenth century, and enjoyed Walkley's elitism and francophilia on "The Times" during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Agate sought to position himself in that tradition, and his criticism consequently is verbose and self-indulgent but hugely entertaining and revealing."