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“... turned Gaullist minister of culture. A piece in the Guardian by their great Paris correspondent, Peter Lennon, described what happened next. There had been a demonstration outside the padlocked gates of the Palais de Chaillot. Godard had been one of its leaders. I was working at the BBC and talked my producer into sending me to Paris. I had heard about ...”

“... Paris figures in the titles of both James Campbell’s and Peter Lennon’s books, but this is a restricted, specialised Paris. Campbell takes us into something called the ‘Interzone’ (the term is odd, and troublesome), inhabited by assorted exiles, misfits and drop-outs during the Fifties and late Forties ...”

“... nothing to do with the A6 murder, but that they had been on intimate terms with the real killer: Peter Alphon. I was hooked on the case that gloomy February afternoon and, nearly 32 years later, I still am. Bob Woffinden’s new book* has revived the intoxicating mixture of anguish and curiosity with which Jean Justice inspired me all those years ago. Since ...”

“... personal history and the pretty stuff on the public record. Let’s take the spirit of J. Michael Lennon’s ‘double life’ of Norman Mailer and offer that doubleness back as subjective criticism. Mailer, after all, gave us the non-fiction novel, Lennon gives us the pseudo-objective biography, so why can’t I offer the ...”

“... might take home to mother: both deeply ordinary, and something entirely new.Later in the decade, Lennon and McCartney would both visit the wilder shores of avant-garde art/pol, though it was the Rolling Stones who summoned Dionysus and Pan, with their none hipper retinue: Kenneth Anger, Christopher Gibbs, Gram Parsons, Jean-Luc Godard. The Beatles grew ...”

“... this upmarket version of RIP, especially when we recall Beckett’s remark to the journalist, Peter Lennon: ‘I have never had a single untroubled moment in my life.’ In an act of misprision that one would normally characterise as incredible, Ricks graces Griffiths’s envoi with the comment that it displays a ‘respectful poignancy’ (perhaps ...”

“... the reference books perhaps. If fame alone is the criterion, where are the Beatles, who, as John Lennon justly pointed out, became more famous than Jesus Christ? In fact, few entertainers qualify, though there are four sporting figures: the cricketers Bradman and Grace, the footballer Pelé and the baseball player Babe Ruth. In addition, Sir Roy Welensky was ...”

“... crowd’, I scribbled in my notebook. ‘Mutton-chop whiskers, chin beards, Van Dyke beards. Blue Lennon shades. Camel overcoats.’ The priest spoke of the king’s renunciation of his ‘earthly crown’, pronounced ‘crine’. Back inside and seated for the service, I spotted more birettas than I’d seen on Anglicans before. I hadn’t heard readings ...”

“... mixing ‘Marxism, narcissism and paganism’, a realisation of the ‘dystopian fantasy of John Lennon’. Talk of ‘white culture’ under threat lit up social media. Commentators wondered if a radical right-wing vision of politics defined by ‘faith, family and flag’ was taking root in the UK. By then, I was long gone. The press officer came ...”

“... of decisive incidents, both familiar and sombre: the Notting Hill Riots of 1958; Tory candidate Peter Griffiths winning Smethwick six years later with the slogan ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Labour’; Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech in 1968; the New Cross fire of 1981 which killed 13 young black men and women; the riots in St ...”

“... wordless work like the String Trio define with quasi-mathematical precision. It is, incidentally, Peter Labanyi, not Bill Hopkins, who rightly translates ‘committed’; Bill Hopkins turns it into the foreign-sounding ‘engaged’. And while both translations seem competent, Labanyi’s is the more natural. But then he could no doubt avail himself of the ...”

“... Then in Leviathan, published some years later, Auster uses the same initials for the narrator, Peter Aaron; and anagrammatic sleight of hand (Delia/Lydia, Iris/Siri: Auster’s real-life loves past and present) further blurs the boundaries between his facts and his fictions. So one approaches his openly autobiographical Hand to Mouth with ...”

“... living together and sometimes apart, and each of them with lovers.Luke had an older brother, Peter, whom both Luke and I idealised in absentia. Peter had left behind a collection of 1960s Marvel comics in sacrosanct box files. These included a nearly complete run of The Fantastic Four, the famous 102 issues drawn by ...”

“... across: much of Hunky Dory consists of pastiches 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 ...”

“... the properties of various drugs. Not only do they turn out to be textual paintings, cousin to Peter Davies’s painted list of the top one hundred all-time hit paintings: they effect a stealthy return to Hirst’s pre-occupation with the body and with disease and death. Keith Coventry’s white on white tribute to Malevich conceals portraits, painted in ...”