“... history is not.’ Young Fritz started pre-med but ended up studying history at Columbia, where Allen Ginsberg was his debating partner. He stayed on for graduate school, left for a few years to teach at Cornell, and then took a job at his alma mater, where he has remained. And so ends the book-within-a-book that has drawn deservedly favourable ...”

“... me interviewing Carolyn Cassady (author of Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg) in her comprehensively occupied Belsize Park flat. The unreality of this situation – talking, shoulder to shoulder, with one of the Beat Generation’s best-preserved icons – was ameliorated by the fact that our paths had crossed a number of times ...”

“... is likewise visually transfixing. Later, he would become a popular Bay Area psychic, a friend to Allen Ginsberg and the Beats and the experimental filmmaker James Broughton and a prominent gay political activist.) Despite Arthur’s chronic selfishness, Esther appears to have treated him in a generous if not saintly spirit. He ended up extracting quite ...”

“... It became fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s, and was used by such countercultural figureheads as Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs – who claimed to have had a spontaneous orgasm in his. Woody Allen parodied it as the ‘Orgasmatron’ in Sleeper. I wondered what place such a machine would have in a school. What was it that ...”

“... around the phone-booths of North America, in the hope and expectation that some phone-booth-using Ginsberg or Emily Dickinson will scrawl beautiful poems inside, and then pass the journal on – and the amazing thing is, they do. People go to make a telephone call, to cancel an appointment at the dentist’s, and instead, bam, inspiration strikes and they ...”

“... his enormous posthumous Collected won America’s National Book Award for 1971; its editor, Donald Allen, has since brought out a Selected and several more volumes of prose and verse. During the 1950s, O’Hara reviewed art and contemporary classical music. He wrote at least seven poems called ‘On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday’, and many others in which music ...”

“... very good indeed. In The Kodak Mantra Diaries, Sinclair’s record of a film project based on Allen Ginsberg’s stay in London thirty years ago, there is an interesting exchange with the psychiatrist David Cooper. Sinclair: It seems to me that what has emerged from this Congress [the Dialectics of Liberation] is the necessity for what has been ...”

“... portrayed as a latter-day version of Bloomsbury or the Columbia University circle of Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs – a group, in other words, whose romanticised reputation, like that of the Beats and Modernists before it, frequently overshadowed its writing. That such talent just happened to gather in a New York City apartment is said to stand as a ...”