“... culture, he doesn’t hide the fact that sustained drug use turns geniuses into cabbages. Miles Davis fights a ‘debilitating’ drug habit; Shane McGowan falls apart under the influence of amphetamines and alcohol; David Crosby and Stephen Stills are ‘too coked-up all the time’ to keep their band together; and – playing in front of a ...”

“... Amadeus Quartet. These last examples are more than incidental in their suggestion of trendiness. Bob Dylan gets eight lines; Dylan Thomas four. George Solti, Colin Davis, Janet Baker and Joan Sutherland are all treated with tight-lipped and austere brevity as compared with Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger. Even ...”

“... Anderson, Laver, Roy Emerson, John Newcombe and Fred Stolle (plus lesser stars like Don Candy and Bob Howe). I wanted to know more about South African tennis during apartheid, which gave rise to Sturgess, Gordon and Jean (his sister) Forbes, plus the colourful Abe Segal, and fine Davis-Cuppers like ...”

“... that. Or any other way.’ The ‘bills floating along beside’ ‘day’s indisputable margin’ bob up in poem after poem, for ‘Living is a meatloaf sandwich./I had a good time up there,’ and the waitress’s shift is about to end. When asked at a White House dinner what he’d done to be invited, Miles ...”

“... the new company to preside over the privatised network. MacGregor had a good idea for chairman: Bob Horton, who had been chucked out of BP for his high-handed management methods but was plainly the best man for the job. Coincidentally, he had also been to St Andrews University with MacGregor. Who should be Horton’s deputy? MacGregor and Foster pondered ...”

“... in Cactus Flower and Applause, a musical adaptation of All about Eve. Bacall took the Bette Davis role, and won a Tony. A decade later she won another one for the musical Woman of the Year. By then she was a New York fixture, living in a magnificent apartment in the Dakota building at 72nd Street and Central Park West. There had been another ...”

“... political influence in Britain comes quite cheap. In late September, the former planning minister Bob Neill was found by a parliamentary committee to have breached its rules by failing to declare that he was being paid £1000 a month for ‘strategic consultancy services’ by a company that was handling planning permission for a luxury hotel development he ...”

“... psychedelic guru Ram Dass put it, to ‘be here now.’The same year that Suzuki arrived, Ronald Davis founded the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which still stages free outdoor performances of raucously political theatre. The Sierra Club was expanding from its roots as a California-based mountaineering club with some achievements in conservation into a national ...”

“... 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 of the Pops on 5 July 1972. It was ...”

“... guess this was where they carried on their sexual shenanigans,’ the narrator’s friend Bob says. ‘Why is it?’ she asks. Just tell me, why is it that no man can mention a place like this without getting around to the subject of sex in about two seconds flat? Just say the words ‘hippie’ or ‘commune’ and all you guys can think about is ...”

“... mid-20th-century liberalism’, and, without doing a Christopher Ricks, who unnecessarily upgraded Bob Dylan’s songs to Great Poetry rather than the more-than-adequate great lyrics that they are, also wanted to claim that there was enough serious and educated thought behind the creation of the series to merit his academic attention. It is central to his ...”

“... workers to watch on TV prize-money bonanzas sponsored by various capitalist firms, and that Steve Davis, the biggest winner, is a lad from East London who votes Tory. It may be that one Davis does more than fifty Tebbits to invest capitalism with glamour and a sense of opportunity. On the other hand, ...”

“... Ana da Silva, who was 27 when they formed, had a doctorate and had written a thesis on Bob Dylan. It also contained excited teenagers. Mark Stewart was a 6’7’’ white boy from Bristol who loved black music. In 1978, aged 17, he and four others formed the Pop Group. The conceptual cockiness of their name hinted at the scale of their ...”

“... impact. It has been an influential cult novel: the Beats imitated its breathless style; Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’ (1963) is clearly based on the tub-thumping final chapter. It was turned down by Hollywood studios 17 times, on the grounds that it was ‘too depressing’; Buñuel was set to direct it in 1965 but the funding collapsed. When ...”

“... more than a handful of people had access to more than a handful of songs by any country bluesman. Bob Dylan got an acetate from his producer, John Hammond, and played it for his mentor, Dave Van Ronk. (‘He didn’t think Johnson was very original,’ Dylan reported. ‘I knew what he meant, but I thought just the opposite.’) Brian Jones played the album ...”