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“... the New Penny in Watford, the kids in their mother’s pussy-bow blouses were getting into what Dylan Jones calls ‘a decade of cultural deregulation’. ‘We all wanted to escape into something that wasn’t really there,’ says Marco Pirroni, one-time guitarist with Adam and the Ants. To begin with, it was a southern English thing, but it spread ...”

“... A spokesman admits that the cancellation of the Saturday night sleeper from London to Aberdeen ‘until the end of time’ is a bitter blow for those who like to wake up on a Sunday morning to the munching of Highland cattle, but there can be no question of having the train back, say the men at Euston. They can’t find a single soul who’ll agree to work the shift ...”

“... some Oedipal tension in the mucosal late 1970s air. Early in Elvis Has Left the Building Dylan Jones, the editor of GQ, brushes against some of the paradoxes of Elvis in the age of punk. But it never goes much further than that. We get nearly as much of the author’s own biography as Presley’s: small-town rock obsessive, punk convert, London ...”

“... Powys, but I, though liking the author’s way with words, could not see the point of his stories. Dylan Thomas’s broadcasts similarly appealed to my father (‘the bullish fields,’ he would say, savouring the words), and it was Dylan Thomas who ‘sent up’ T.F. Powys so memorably on the BBC Home Service, without even ...”

“... band on the planet. A notable if unsurprising absence from the Vote for Change parade is Bob Dylan, who was misquoted by Jimmy Carter when he accepted the Democratic nomination in 1976, and who hasn’t said a straight word about politics for forty years. In a recent interview in the Sunday Telegraph, Dylan said he ...”

“... is a novel based on the life of the Egyptian singer Om Kalthoum. It carries a plug from Bob Dylan: ‘Om Kalthoum is great. She really is.’ This is unenlightening for three reasons: first, Om Kalthoum’s greatness isn’t in dispute; second, Dylan will plug anything these days (remember those ads for Victoria’s ...”

“... threat posed by a sinister and nebulous enemy from the other side of the world. It could be Bob Dylan performing his ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’ (‘I discovered there was red stripes on the American flag’); but the year is 2002, and the song is ‘Talkin’ Al Kida Blues’ (‘Cuba’s our enemy, unless we need a prison camp’). Al Kida ...”

“... killing me.’ The Education Secretary was, unsurprisingly, sharply criticised; not least by Peter Jones, a Spectator columnist, who told the BBC that ‘a calm, reasoned and balanced judgment would put it down to pig ignorance and blind prejudice’ – open-eyed prejudice being, I suppose, more to his taste. This is too harsh. What Clarke said was that ...”

“... could also have been called Motherless Brooklyn – is quite different. It tells the story of Dylan Ebdus, who grows up in Brooklyn during the 1970s, and whose mother abandons him when he is a teenager. It is obviously autobiographical: Lethem was raised in the same part of Brooklyn as Dylan, and his mother died when he ...”

“... often seem designed for target practice, require the sitters to be sitting ducks as well. But Bob Dylan can’t stand sitting. Try playing chess with him: ‘His knees bounce up against the table so much you think you are at a séance. The pieces keep jumping around the board. But he beats me every time.’ (Dave Van Ronk said that.) That must be how every ...”

“... a hundred or so well-known authors from 54 countries, not including Isabel Allende, Bob Dylan or Gabriel García Márquez, who admirably declined to vote. The Guardian did a vox pop. New Puritan about town Nicholas Blincoe rather proudly let slip that he’s read 81 of the top 100; smashing Mark Lawson (69) into a measly second place. ‘I think the ...”

“... c’est lui. Writers must get tired of answering crass questions – and not only writers. Bob Dylan, when asked by a journalist what his songs were ‘about’, said: ‘Some of my songs are about four minutes, some are about five minutes and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve.’ Bernard’s book is organised alphabetically, according to ...”

“... Dylan Thomas’s​ foredoomed premature death feels intrinsic to his late romanticism, part of what made him the ‘Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive’, as he labelled himself. But he could have escaped the legend to which he had devoted such energies. As Paul Ferris’s excellent biography established some time back, while Thomas was certainly in a bad way, his death was down to a medical blunder ...”

“... from Chaucer to Spenser and Shakespeare and Donne, through Milton and Blake and Keats, to David Jones, Gascoyne, Dylan Thomas, Nicholas Moore, to Lee Harwood’s Cable Street, Bill Griffiths’s Whitechapel and Brian Catling’s The Stumbling Block. London infected its interpreters, soliciting contributions to an ...”

“... mother, a young woman from Chicago, and befriended a handsome doctor’s son called Prince Jones, whose untimely death at the hands of the police functions as the moral fulcrum of the book. Coates then writes of his early years of struggle as a freelance journalist, but says little of his subsequent triumphs at the Atlantic, where since 2008 he has ...”