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“... sitting on a rock adopting the pose of Rodin’s Thinker, a loincloth around his waist. ‘Like Dylan or Bowie,’ O’Toole remarks, ‘he was one of the great masters of self-invention, a nobody who captured the zeitgeist.’ In fact, Shaw and Bob Dylan are the only two people to have won both an Oscar and a Nobel ...”

“... working hard on my old verses (after all, he reminded me, Arabs have produced good translations of Dylan Thomas and James Joyce) and was put out when I rejected them and gave him the new simplistic piece: but I was determined to ‘make my position clear’, so that no one thought me to represent some devious British foreign policy (if such there be) connected ...”

“... in his own life made it particularly precious to him. Aged nearly forty, Williams fell for Phyllis Jones, the 25-year-old blonde librarian at Amen House. This was the first of a series of affairs in which he would opt for a blessed state of sexual frustration. The relationship was that of lover and mistress, but also master and pupil. ...”

“... least known movie, The Big One (1997), where he launches effortlessly into a gravelly imitation of Dylan singing ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ before reverting, with a chuckle, to his own spoken voice. In his films, his physical appearance – in flannel shirt and outsize jeans – represents Moore the underdog, the champion of regular working ...”

“... book, about his childhood, are written in a strain of hyperbole, sometimes as pleasingly Welsh as Dylan or Gwyn Thomas. Before we reach the third section, about his pre-war adventures among Arabs, Cubans and Sicilians, we have been astonished by his weird boyhood in Carmarthen and Enfield, where his experiences seem scarcely less bizarre and exotic. We no ...”

“... project a diffused self-portrait onto four well-known cultural figures who had been his friends (Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Eric Gill and John Middleton Murry), evoking them first separately and then in some slightly dizzying comparisons: I had seen Murry working, happily absorbed and with real skill, mending fences, sawing up logs (once, too ...”

“... of those years when the pianist McCoy Tyner played in the quartet. Tyner and the drummer Elvin Jones left the group when Coltrane expanded it and started to explore free jazz. Coltrane began to blow notes that ruptured blood vessels in his nose. ‘All a musician can do,’ he said, ‘is to get closer to the sources of nature, and so feel that he is in ...”

“... of Larkin’s life were still unavailable, especially most of the letters written to Monica Jones, a lecturer at the University of Leicester, who was his closest companion and lover, but never wife. The publication, in 2010, of Letters to Monica, edited by Anthony Thwaite, changed the earlier impression of Larkin’s mind and personality, especially the ...”

“... are three kinds of classic American crash: the James Dean, Eddie Cochran legend-sealer; the Bob Dylan at Woodstock disaster turned into an opportunity for reinvention; and the sweet Gene Vincent long martyrdom. Clift could have been another James Dean. Instead he was granted the Gene Vincent twilight, doomed to carry on as his own shadow, the ravenous crowd ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the idea of a Snowdonia National Park, quickly added: ‘but keep it under your Crown.’ Jonah Jones has a slightly different version of the same story, like anyone who heard it from Clough himself. In his two autobiographies, Architect Errant (1971) and the even more errant Around the World in Ninety Years (1978), there are different versions, although in ...”

“... strips off as he was likely to do in youth or early middle age, but when doing a tour with Bob Dylan he suggested that they should be filmed together in bed, talking about ‘ecology, capitalism, communism, God, poetry, meditation and America’. The couple settled for improvising a slow blues, ‘trading verses back and forth’ over Jack Kerouac’s ...”

“... and Disney cartoons are unifying experiences. When Jim looks tense, Tommy immediately thinks of Dylan on the cover of Blonde on Blonde. After a party, somewhat drunk, Tommy and Jim do some digging in a trench being excavated by the telephone company, and decide they need to sing something to help them keep time. They try various songs by the Beatles and the ...”

“... some, all this exposure, combined with a move to a ‘mainstream’ publisher, has been like Bob Dylan going electric, but it represents an opportunity for the most radically innovative poet now writing to extend his readership. Prynne has been compared with John Ashbery, but there is little of Ashbery’s canny slackness of tone or perspective. The ...”

“... never really altered, beyond darkening her hair and wearing heavier versions of beatnik black. Bob Dylan steered her away from torch songs, Jim Morrison told her to learn an instrument and write her own songs, and Ornette Coleman helped her to find her way of playing the harmonium.Her relationships with a series of rock stars are the subject of titillation and ...”