![]() For those of us who are fans of his stuff, as well as devotees of The Fab Four, the news last year that He was working on a new book about Them sounded like a celestial combination of writer and subject. Parodist, critic, author of the peerless Private Eye “Diary”, Brown is also a Beatlemaniac. It was, writes Brown, “an exercise in playing about with the past.” Readers of Brown’s might understand why this would appeal particularly to him, as a writer determined to make sense of British popular history, or at least to explore it, by reinventing the method of its delivery. Their most forward-and-at-the-same-time-backward-looking album was Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in 1967. ![]() They were modernists, agents of change, forging the future, and they were preservationists, forever harking back to the past, real and imagined, England’s and their own. The Beatles entered our bloodstreams, collective and individual, and they pulsate in them still. The most significant band in the history of pop, they are key figures in the past half-century of our nation’s public life, as well as in the dream lives of its citizens. “When we talk about The Beatles,” writes Craig Brown, “we talk about ourselves.” For an international phenomenon, The Beatles were peculiarly, cussedly English.
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