“... blues singer gazing up at the lights of Times Square is not only banal, it is bizarre,’ Greil Marcus wrote in 1975. Gradually, the image morphed into something more modern: ‘Robert Johnson may be the first ever rock star,’ the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame said when it inducted him in 1986, the year it opened. Wald was especially good at ...”

“... were just fooling around.’ The gloomy echo-chamber ambience is indeed part of their allure. As Greil Marcus wrote in his book about the recordings, Invisible Republic (1997), ‘the murk creates its own mystique.’ News of the secret cache of Dylan compositions began to leak out in the early months of 1968. Copies of an acetate containing 14 of the ...”

“... Islington; they kiss, wander past the shops selling Indian-print scarves or punk bootlegs, buy Greil Marcus and Flannery O’Connor books, visit pubs. ‘It was rare to see anyone over forty, as if there were a curfew for older people.’ This, for Shahid, is the life – the clamour and congestion for which an Asian upbringing had left him ...”

“... Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, are elegantly tacky and anti-intellectual exercises in mimetic form. Greil Marcus’s much-admired and equally mocked Lipstick Traces (1989), on the other hand, is a massively prolix and pretentious voyage round Dada and Situationism and every revolt against history since history began, all sparked off – or so ...”

“... the critical world has been primed for its reappearance. Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good and Greil Marcus’s The Invisible Republic – recent accounts of the curious development of American folk music – both devote considerable space to the Smith collection, making impressive claims on its behalf. Cantwell’s assertion that it was the ...”