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“... collection of her poems appeared. Tonks loved Baudelaire in the same self-conscious way the young Patti Smith loved Rimbaud and Tom Verlaine loved his namesake. On the centenary of his death in 1967, she lay down next to his effigy in Montparnasse to confirm they were the same height, the king and queen of a rainy country.What they had in common wasn’t ...”

“... Enid Starkie, too. But most, including the Beats, Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk, Jim Morrison and Patti Smith, took Rimbaud to be a key French import for the prosperity of imaginative dissent in their own culture, and in some cases as a fashion accessory. Easy to sneer at them, but no bad thing to bear in mind that London was the making of some of ...”

“... frontman of Television, who died recently – became Tom Verlaine, while his sometime girlfriend Patti Smith hollered ‘Go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud!’ and his pal Richard Hell traded Huysmans lines with Lester Bangs. One of the founding members of the anarchist outfit Crass changed his name by deed poll in 1977 to Penny Rimbaud. Here were the Fall, and the ...”

“... His Nipple Pierced, later shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art; and in a Daley movie about Patti Smith’s menstrual period, our hero is shown changing her sanitary napkin. The relationship with the ‘surrealistically rude’ Smith proved catalytic. (Robert, too, would later be characterised as ‘lyrically ...”

“... that his father would put his head down and fiddle with his mashed potatoes when he or his sister, Patti, clashed with their mother at the dinner table. Reagan himself, as governor and president, would remain serene amid the rancorous rivalries of his subordinates; smoothing things over with bland assurances was a way to keep darker feelings at bay and put ...”

“... 1965, rummaging through a junk shop, Wilson found a bootlegged 78 with the label: ‘Bessie Smith – Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine.’ Wilson had heard rock and roll and pop songs as a child but never the blues. Smith’s sound was a revelation. ‘The universe stuttered and everything fell to ...”