“... there were moments of the kind of unintentional comedy that always arises on such occasions. When William Burroughs – wearing a grey suit, a grey tie, and an expression like that of the pastor of a back-street spiritualist chapel who has no misgivings about the world to come, but a few about making ends meet in this one – was asked about ...”

“... Peaches Geldof – who serve as evidence that the religion makes the ‘able more able’. Even William Burroughs, during his brief stint in the church, was featured in Freedom bragging that he’d become a more imaginative writer and dismissing the notion that artists healed of their neuroses and compulsions would be bereft of inspiration. (He later ...”

“... Ulysses – and the magazine continued to come out, albeit with diminishing frequency, until 1969. William Burroughs, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn and Barbara Guest all appeared in its pages. Producing the Floating Bear was an ‘endless rhythm of editing, typing, proofing, printing, collating, stapling, labelling and mailing’, but di Prima ...”

“... source. My bias, which I will attempt to overcome, tends towards the more cynical view ascribed to William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac. ‘When you start separating the people from their rivers what have you got? Bureaucracy!’ Having triumphantly ghosted London’s autobiography, Ackroyd’s obvious follow-up was the Thames: generator of life, origin of ...”

“... writers when the subject finds himself among the sons of the East Coast establishment, from William Burroughs of St Louis to Norman Mailer, the Brooklyn Jew. The Lampoon officers recognised the worker in the ‘cultural bumpkin’: he could put out the magazine single-handed while everyone else was horsing around and drinking, a vice Updike hardly ...”

“... until the appointed hour for his interview with an old queen in Deal, or with the executed traitor William Joyce’s daughter, by his second wife, in Gillingham. Carry On grotesques, professional alcoholics, poets suffering with their nerves, Broadstairs fascists, economic migrants of every stamp: all the devils are here. From the areal to Ariel, Seabrook ...”

“... go out much. Place is unimportant. It’s where you live, no more than that: a stopover. How did William Burroughs finish up in a clapboard cabin in Lawrence, Kansas, with his brood of sleek, well-fed felines? The old man mumbled something unconvincing about property prices. Why did the quintessentially English Michael Moorcock nominate the second ...”

“... Ralph Rumney took up his camera and stalked Alan Ansen, Beat poet, paedophile and intimate of William Burroughs, publishing the finished product as a systematic collage called A Psychogeographic Map of Venice. More often than not, however, the city meant Paris. Like Benjamin, the Surrealists or indeed Baudelaire, the Situationists saw Paris as a ...”

“... black Britain. From then on he was rarely out of the news: encouraged by Alexander Trocchi and William Burroughs, he penned execrable verse, topical examples of which he sent to Chairman Mao who rapidly telexed back his response; when Muhammad Ali came to London for his championship fight with Henry Cooper, Michael X escorted him to West Indian ...”

“... would remodel itself perpetually, like a transformer or a superchangeling: an unrealisable ideal William Burroughs brought down to the affordability of ordinary people in his proposal for the cut-up book, which you could simply rearrange at home according to your fancy. But The Invisible in Architecture is closer to these ideal images than the literary ...”

“... and corner of the eye glimpses of other reports over which he had no control. Penman liked the William Burroughs moment, reading the tabloid spread as a single unit. There was something subversive, communal and hopefully dangerous, about the whole enterprise. Now all that was over. Penman had crossed the line and become a version of the thing he was ...”

“... interpretations’, and the crazy-enough-to-be-true projections of Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard (who wrote incisively about Surrealism). The afterlife of Surrealism is more active in poetry, as in the New York School of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and others: ‘We all “grew up Surrealist”,’ Ashbery once ...”

“... against the dark knights of the state. The difference between Kafka’s view of the state, or William Burroughs’ or even George Orwell’s, and that of James Kelman, is that Kelman believes his fiction offers a more or less literal depiction of how the state operates – it’s not a surreal thing or a symbolic thing or a thing in the mind, for him ...”

“... possessions. We were just sick of being had.’ A taxi driver rants ‘about wogs and how reading William Burroughs made him different from all the other cab drivers in Columbus and could I tell him how to make a living as an artist?’ Is it self-evident to everybody why people (e.g. ‘artworld cohorts’) are wrong to be rude to Chris, but it’s fine ...”

“... and early Fifties, when he sat in coffee shops and dyke bars, Horn and Hardart’s, talking at Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac with feverish intensity, disconnected hipsters admired the vigour of their discourse. ‘Dig that aggression!’ Tony Torres goes out in baroque style, crucified inside a TV dish, ‘splayed and mounted like a butterfly’ by a ...”