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One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time: Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize by [Craig Brown]

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Craig Brown

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time: Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize Kindle Edition

by Craig Brown (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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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.

Print length

642 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Fourth Estate
Publication date

2 April 2020
File size

42733 KB
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‘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

‘Kaleidoscopic … It’s like a compilation of mobile phone footage in a modern editing style as you piece together this extraordinary journey. I think it’s the most exhilarating way of reading a biography; a masterpiece’ Alexander Armstrong

‘It’s ingenious, wholly original (not a given, what with the subject matter), absolutely gripping, funny, sad and moving. A complete treat.’ India Knight

'I have never been very interested in the Beatles. In fact I wouldn’t cross the road to see them . . . even Abbey Road. Yet I can’t put this wonderful book down.' Barry Humphries, Telegraph

‘A brilliantly executed study of cultural time, social space and the madness of fame . . . One Two Three Four, by putting The Beatles in their place as well as their time, is by far the best book anyone has written about them and the closest we can get to the truth.’ Literary Review

‘Brown seems to have invented a wholly new biographical form. In a polychromatic cavalcade of chapters of varying length, the man with kaleidoscope eyes conveys what it was like to live through those extraordinary Beatles years . . . If you want to know what it was like to live those extraordinary Beatles years in real time, read this book.’ Alan Johnson, Spectator

--This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Book Description

Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize

--This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07XDMZS2X
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Fourth Estate (2 April 2020)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 42733 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 642 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 000834003X

Best Sellers Rank: 34,602 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 30 in Biographies of Rock Musicians
- 46 in Biographies of Comedians
- 48 in Biographies of the Rich & Famous

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3,022 ratings

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Dan Moss

Enjoyable and Funny, but a Lot of Errors!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 April 2020

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It's not easy to present the Beatles story from a fresh and different angle, but this book does it in a fascinating and funny way. I loved Brown's previous book on Princess Margaret, and this is just as enjoyable. However I also noticed a lot of careless mistakes in the text, so in the unlikely event that Craig Brown or his publishers read this, here are a few of them -

p.65 - Brian Epstein's family business was North End Music Stores, not North East Music Stores.
p.123 - The New York folk music venue was 'Cafe Wha?' not Cafe What.
p.259 - Prime Minister Harold Wilson was not "a fellow Liverpudlian", he was from Huddersfield in Yorkshire.
p.308 - John and Aunt Mimi lived in Woolton, not Walton.
p.363 - The lyrics to Across the Universe are "Jai Guru Dev", not Jai Guru Deva.
p.389 - The song It's Getting Better is not "set in school".
p.451 - Across the Universe wasn't written in India.
p.491 - Two different lines from Hey Jude are mixed up, so the point about mishearing the lyrics makes no sense.
p.552 - Paul has a cigarette in his right hand on the Abbey Road cover, not his left hand.
p.575 - "Marital virtues" should read martial virtues.

376 people found this helpful

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Lawrence Windrush

Brilliant

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 April 2020

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Like Craig Brown’s previous biography Ma’am Darling, this book similarly uses a polychromatic style of letters, anecdotes, diary entries, fan recollections, musical analysis and personal memoir to create a rich textured multilayered history of the Beatles.
I absolutely loved this book, it’s a history of the Beatles without the boring bits. It’s extremely funny and Craig Brown never misses a telling anecdote. Quite clearly not a fan of Oko Ono, he has enormous fun at her expense, brilliantly ridiculing her exploits. Of course this is a brief overview so don’t expect detailed critiques of every album and there are some major omissions- Linda McCartney doesn’t get a mention at all but I have never read such an entertaining book on the Beatles. In these dark and troubled times I can highly recommend this astonishing book. A superb treat.

54 people found this helpful

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Andrew G. Matthews

Caveat emptor

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 April 2020

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A disappointment. This book is clumsily structured and has been poorly edited. It offers no new insights into its subject(s) and almost all the anecdotes are available in other, rather better written biographies. The notes appended to some of the chapters are often more interesting than the chapters themselves. A shoddy piece of hack work.

52 people found this helpful

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Anorakus

150 glimpses of The Beatles

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 April 2020

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The blurb on the back of The Beatles in Time has a few plugs for Ma'am Darling, Craig Brown's meta-biography of Princess Margaret - appropriate since TBIT is effectively a companion book to the latter, following an almost identical format. (The two even converge when Brown writes about The Beatles' appearance at the Royal Variety Performance.) The scattergun approach will frustrate anyone looking for a conventional chronography of the band, but there have been plenty of those written - CB's selected vignettes of their lives are endlessly fascinating and revealing. I particularly enjoyed the 'what if' pivotal moments where we could be living in a Yesterday-style alternative universe, and the accounts of The Beatles' steamroller effect on the popular entertainment scene of the early 60's (some of their peers didn't take kindly to being reduced to second billing overnight by the Fab Four juggernaut.) A real page-turner and every bit as fascinating and addictive as Ma'am Darling.

28 people found this helpful

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N_C

Refreshing take on a familiar story

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 April 2020

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Over the years I’ve read most of the Beatles biography books - Hunter Davies, Mark Lewisohn etc and they are all very enjoyable. This one provides a different take on the familiar stories and I’d recommend it to people who are familiar with the other volumes on the subject.

28 people found this helpful

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Pure Entertainment

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 April 2020

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I'm not a massive fan of The Beatles, nowhere near it, but I do like reading of contemporary history and The Sixties was the decade I was born into. So, when I read rave reviews of this book, I splashed a tenner for the Kindle Edition. And it was well worth it. I'd read some Craig Brown before and had liked his sense of humour, something that permeates this book. He has an eye for the funny quote, the ridiculous event and the absurdity of what a lot of "Beatlemania" brought about. (Yes, Yoko, we mean you.) Resultantly, the book wears its research and narrative very lightly, although you're never left thinking that this isn't anything but a serious history of a time and a place in British and Western society. If I was to write a history book - and I have a degree in the subject - this is the kind of history I'd want to write. I think it's definitely ahead of other really enjoyable "serious" contemporary histories I've read by "proper" historians, such as Dominic Sandbrook ("Who Dares Wins") and Alwyn Turner's superb "Rejoice! Rejoice!".
If I'd one slight criticism it's that it goes on a wee bit too long, maybe like The Beatles did too. And some of the techniques, such as recounting Brian Epstein's life backward, don't really work. But then, people used to play Beatles LP's backward for enlightenment, so I get the idea. In the end, this was a really entertaining, really enjoyable history of The Sixties and The Beatles too, and I doubt I'll read a better book this year.

19 people found this helpful

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d a campbell

Written to please Mcartney rather than offer the truth

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 April 2020

Verified Purchase

The book begins with the birth of Paul Mcartney, insinuating that this is somehow the birth of the Beatles, this is an outright lie.
John formed the Beatles, lead the Beatles until he disappeared into a cloud of hallucegenics for a while. Paul only led by default it could not have happened without John allowing it to happen.
There does exist a genius in the Beatles, and it is not Paul Mcartney.
As usual with 21st century Beatles books the truth has been rewritten, how much does Mcartney pay for these relentless whitewashes

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