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“... incidentally, as much the lunatic behaviour of their drummer, the late and lamented Keith Moon, as Pete Townshend’s songs of adolescent rebellion that won them column inches. Moon was juvenile, a jester from Wembley who delighted in pranks. But the group was remarkable for other things. While the Beatles accomplished a smooth crossing-over into show ...”

“... Pale Companion. It is striking that the figure on a poster for The Who in a boy’s study – ‘Pete Townshend, wearing his white boiler-suit, leapt on the wall behind Alex’s black, curly hair’ – is now one of the novelist’s new colleagues at Faber: but in this work at least there is not enough done for the reader to feel offered more than the ...”

“... with it: ‘I think this is a pile of shit while John Sinclair rots in prison.’ (Like Hoffman, Pete Townshend went off-message from ‘the spirit of Woodstock’ at that point. ‘Fuck off!’ he announced. ‘Fuck off my fucking stage!’) But Lang never imagined the festival as a political event and it never was: this was a countercultural ...”

“... was the wittiest person in the world ... He was one of the biggest life forces I’ve ever met.’ Pete Townshend said: ‘When he died I felt I’d lost the last sense of everything coming into my life; I felt from now on I was never, never going to get topped up ...”

“... find two more different musical cries: Davis’s liquid tone is hurt, steely, recessive, where Townshend’s is upfront, impatient, hectoring. One arrow points in, the other out. But somewhere in the journey from one to the other, from cool, cruel blue to Townshend’s three-minute psychodrama – ‘I look all white/but ...”

“... Poetry written in dialect seems to be undergoing a resurgence. Tony Harrison has made extensive use of Northern idioms. Tom Paulin has been busy raiding Ulster (and, I suspect, Scottish) dictionaries. Craig Raine has produced a manifesto, ‘Babylonish Dialects’, on dialect’s behalf. And several of the books under review here – by Scots, Welshmen and British West Indians – cannot be read without the glossaries which they thoughtfully provide ...”

“... and to adopt African dress, ‘the first true music industry radical feminist’, according to Pete Townshend. In the process, Simone and her songs – the performance of self – had become part of the ground on which African Americans stood. ‘White people had Judy Garland. We had Nina,’ the comedian Richard Pryor said. Simone’s voice answered ...”

“... began to appear in the oddest places: on Mary Quant miniskirts and draped round the shoulders of Pete Townshend (Patriots is always keen to assert the world-beating quality of British pop). Weight seizes on this, arguing that such ‘promiscuous use’ of the national flag was ‘the most visible sign that the British were reclaiming patriotism from its ...”