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“... he coedited with René Hague, and forbade their publication during his own lifetime. Now, however, Thomas Dilworth has edited them as Wedding Poems. It’s a handsome-looking volume. There are photographs of Jones and the Grisewoods along with reproductions of some of Jones’s paintings of the time. There is also extensive critical and biographical commentary ...”

“... Redding played a series of shows at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles. On the first night, Bob Dylan turned up with an advance pressing of ‘Just Like a Woman’, which he hoped Redding would cover. (‘I like it but it’s got too many fuckin’ words,’ Redding said, according to another of his biographers. ‘All these pigtails and bobbytails and all ...”

“... by a backlist of Seeker foreign authors including Mishima, Moravia, Svevo, Gide, Colette, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Grass, Böll and half a dozen others, found that the whole lot added up to half Orwell’s earnings in the same period. New editions of four books have just been published, said to be ‘authoritative texts’ although in some the variants from the ...”

“... In turn Herbert is freed from the burden of acting out his good intentions, the burden which made Dylan reject his original audience, becoming steadily more cryptic and spiky, and which makes Billy Bragg seem exhausted by figurehead duty. Formalist art contains the sincerity of its maker without needing to transmit it directly. That’s the theory anyway. Of ...”

“... human manner: ‘In 1849 poison achieved what the razor had failed to achieve the year before. Thomas Lovell Beddoes succeeded in killing himself. Failure seemed to have become what Beddoes was best at.’ Ricks quotes the poet’s own words – ‘From the experiments I have made, I fear I am a non-conductor of friendship, a not-very-likeable ...”

“... an almost uncanny ability to inspire musicians and find what was individual in their music. Bob Dylan, who listened to Sun radio recordings as a boy in the 1950s, described the music’s quality in Chronicles: ‘I’d always thought that Sun Records and Sam Phillips himself had created the most crucial, uplifting and powerful records ever made. On Sun ...”

“... have been a brilliant one, though hardly palatable to any but the most reticent souls, such as Thomas Pynchon. Mailer and Capote, more than anyone else, used television and the popular press to create personae in a culture where art objects and ideas are considered indigestible except in a solution of strong personality. Mailer married extensively, stabbed ...”

“... far from what would in Britain be called ‘Victorian’. Not surprising, perhaps, given how much Thomas Carlyle took from German literature and philosophy; how important Goethe was for George Eliot; how much Matthew Arnold admired German education. It is also telling how compatible a veneration for Kultur was with the Victorian values of service and civic ...”

“... seem to remember writing some dark allegorical story.Poems?No. I’d written odd poems, very sub-Dylan Thomas. I remember having or buying Thomas’s Collected Poems. I liked the whole idea of him so anything I wrote sort of resembled him, though I pretended it didn’t.Were you working quite hard in the sixth form ...”

“... exemplified, perhaps, in a literary sense, in the development of that remarkable novelist Gwyn Thomas. His first, unpublished novel was Sorrow for thy sons, bitter and angry in the suffering of 1935. By the 1950s he was producing those hilarious novels and stories, the most agonisingly funny writing in English in his time, which were not only his but a ...”

“... era of collage in all sorts of media: not just Robert Rauschenberg, but also John Ashbery and Bob Dylan. For Barthelme, it wasn’t simply a matter of playing with found forms or language. That was ‘cheapo surrealism’. Instead his stories explore situations (‘The Party’, ‘Brain Damage’, ‘City Life’) that are experienced as collage. In ‘The ...”

“... New York State, where he was hanging out at the time. Van Morrison was living in the vicinity, Bob Dylan too. Lang approached two wealthy young entrepreneurs to fund the studio project, and one of them, Joel Rosenman, suggested it might make more sense to put money into a live event. Woodstock Ventures was duly constituted and the team set to work on a ...”

“... ever on $1.67-a-gallon petroleum, out here in a terrain just a little less harsh than Afghanistan. Thomas Jefferson was afraid of the red lands, afraid that where the arable soil ended so would his arcadian yeoman ideal, and that Europeans would revert to nomadism. There’s something roving and ferocious about the Euroamerican West that suggests he’s ...”

“... promotional freebie, and composed of three short, pictorial essays about three dope-fiend authors, Thomas de Quincey, Marcel Schwob and John Keats. The essays are clearly the product of much reading – Jaeggy has translated Schwob’s Vies imaginaires and De Quincey’s Last Days of Immanuel Kant into Italian – though it’s the reading not of a scholar but ...”

“... of Bowie’s musical heroes of the 1960s – John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Anthony Newley, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground. Which would make Ziggy Stardust the beautiful butterfly that emerged from the chrysalis. Paul Trynka begins his biography with a description of Bowie’s performance of ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops on 5 July 1972. It was three ...”