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One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time by Craig Brown review — a complete treat

Comic writer Craig Brown’s tour through the life and times of the Beatles could not be more fun — and is the perfect tonic

Driving force: the Beatles in 1967’s Magical Mystery Tour
Driving force: the Beatles in 1967’s Magical Mystery Tour
©APPLE CORPS/BBC/ALAMY
The Sunday Times

Contrary to popular belief, lots of people have always hated the Beatles. “Musically they are a near disaster,” said Newsweek, calling their lyrics “a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments”. Their music was “vapid . . . twanging nonsense”, wrote the novelist Anthony Burgess. They were “not merely awful”, agreed the conservative writer William F Buckley, but “appallingly unmusical” and “dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art”.

But at least the Beatles weren’t as awful as their fans. “A mass masturbation orgy” of “squealing young maniacs”, wrote Noël Coward. With their “huge faces, bloated with cheap confectionery and smeared with chain-store make-up”, agreed the New Statesman’s Paul Johnson, they were a “bottomless chasm of vacuity”. The good news, said Johnson,