“... easier, in fact,’ notes Katie, ‘to write down the people in world history that they both like: Bob Dylan (although not recently), Graham Greene, Quentin Tarantino and Tony Hancock.’ Andrew and David, it has to be said, would probably count Nick Hornby somewhere between Martin Amis and Jeffrey Archer. How to Be Good is uneven. Compared to ...”

“... night winds are still there, are reliable, are what you have in the end. ‘Wanted Man’, which Bob Dylan wrote in 1969, is a boastful list of all the places a criminal is wanted, a recitation that includes Albuquerque and Tallahassee and Baton Rouge and Buffalo, ‘but there’s one place I’m not wanted/Lord, it’s the place that I call ...”

“... era of collage in all sorts of media: not just Robert Rauschenberg, but also John Ashbery and Bob Dylan. For Barthelme, it wasn’t simply a matter of playing with found forms or language. That was ‘cheapo surrealism’. Instead his stories explore situations (‘The Party’, ‘Brain Damage’, ‘City Life’) that are experienced as collage. In ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In turn Herbert is freed from the burden of acting out his good intentions, the burden which made Dylan reject his original audience, becoming steadily more cryptic and spiky, and which makes Billy Bragg seem exhausted by figurehead duty. Formalist art contains the sincerity of its maker without needing to transmit it directly. That’s the theory anyway. Of ...”

“... Beatty – who produced the film as well as starring in it – had originally wanted Bob Dylan to play the role of Clyde. As for Dunaway, Bonnie was a braless rebel in a tam o’ shanter. Apart from their crimes, the real Bonnie and Clyde were not so very rebellious, as Jeff Guinn’s admirably thorough biography shows. Right to the bloody ...”

“... they could have been arranged deliberately.’ I like Richard Sennett in the way some people like Bob Dylan: I know that he writes a lot and that his stuff is uneven, but when he’s good he’s just so brilliant, and even when he’s less brilliant he has such style and heart. Quite a lot of this book reads to me like blog-type offcuts: the bit about ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for a Black producer to be working in the world of white pop and rock – Tom Wilson, who produced Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Nico and the Velvet Underground, is the most overlooked figure here – and it was Sonny Bono who took the writing and production credits; on the back cover of Look at Us, the couple’s debut LP, Battiste is listed merely as ...”

“... Before he discovered literature in a friend’s apartment in New York, Bob Dylan’s connection to the world beyond the narrow one into which he was born came almost exclusively from the radio. The radio is usually on somewhere in the background of his memoirs, and it’s always broadening his horizons, letting him know what American music could sound like, in all its unexpected variety ...”

“... in his octopus’s garden in the shade. And while the old white rockers are well represented here (Bob Dylan 27, Neil Young 6, Bruce Springsteen 7), there is nothing from Rihanna, and only one line from Jay-Z (‘I’m not afraid of dying/I’m afraid of not trying’). Louis Armstrong and Aretha Franklin get one quotation each, which shows way too little ...”

“... figures too: Joan Baez, Richard Farina, who composed an instrumental called ‘Hamish’, and Bob Dylan, who used to sing Henderson’s ‘Banks o’ Sicily’ and who heard more of his songs from Redpath. Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’, and ‘The Times They Are ...”

“... with books, including her own, rather than moving on to something new – though she did like Bob Dylan. When she wrote, she would take a pencil to the fourth draft, which was ‘practically a fair copy’, and delete any word she could, putting a tally at the bottom of each page: ‘crossed out seven words’.As Frick’s health began to ...”

“... Before a huge, informal and mainly young crowd, Aretha Franklin sings ‘Respect’ and Bob Dylan makes a surprise appearance to perform ‘Chimes of Freedom’. Clinton and his young family appear to sing along with both. There is much heady talk about the end of the Eighties, that decade of greed and self-delusion and secret government. But ...”

“... to the Likely Lads, with the flinty, sarcastic Terry and the more emollient, more sentimental Bob as obvious stand-ins for Lennon and McCartney. Black and white beginnings superseded by mid-1960s colour: Bob’s sudden beard and flowing purple cravat, Terry lamenting that his army stretch in Germany exiled him from the ...”