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One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time  By  cover art

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time

By: Craig Brown
Narrated by: Mark McGann, Kate Robbins, Craig Brown
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Publisher's summary

SHORTLISTED for the Baillie Gifford Prize’s 25th Anniversary Winner of Winners award

WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2020

A Spectator Book of the Year • A Times Book of the Year • A Telegraph Book of the Year • A Sunday Times Book of the Year

From the award-winning author of Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret comes a fascinating, hilarious, kaleidoscopic biography of the Fab Four.

John Updike compared them to ‘the sun coming out on an Easter morning’. Bob Dylan introduced them to drugs. The Duchess of Windsor adored them. Noel Coward despised them. JRR Tolkien snubbed them. The Rolling Stones copied them. Loenard Bernstein admired them. Muhammad Ali called them ‘little sissies’. Successive Prime Ministers sucked up to them. No one has remained unaffected by the music of The Beatles. As Queen Elizabeth II observed on her golden wedding anniversary, ‘Think what we would have missed if we had never heard The Beatles.’

One Two Three Four traces the chance fusion of the four key elements that made up The Beatles: fire (John), water (Paul), air (George) and earth (Ringo). It also tells the bizarre and often unfortunate tales of the disparate and colourful people within their orbit, among them Fred Lennon, Yoko Ono, the Maharishi, Aunt Mimi, Helen Shapiro, the con artist Magic Alex, Phil Spector, their psychedelic dentist John Riley and their failed nemesis, Det Sgt Norman Pilcher.

From the bestselling author of Ma’am Darling comes a kaleidoscopic mixture of history, etymology, diaries, autobiography, fan letters, essays, parallel lives, party lists, charts, interviews, announcements and stories. One Two Three Four joyfully echoes the frenetic hurly-burly of an era.

©2020 Craig Brown (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic reviews

"A ridiculously enjoyable treat...Brown is such an infectiously jolly writer that you don't even need to like the Beatles to enjoy his book...brilliant...hilarious...And at a time when, like everybody else, I was feeling not entirely thrilled about the news, I loved every word of it." (Sunday Times)

"A celestial combination of writer and subject...One Two Three Four is a critical appreciation, a personal history, a miscellany, a work of scholarship and speculation and a tribute as passionate and worshipful as any fan letter." (Esquire)

"The perfect antidote to these times." (Julian Barnes, Guardian)

What listeners say about One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time

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Funny and sad!

Easy to read, and you don't need to be a fan. having lived though this time I really enjoyed it


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