Winner of the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
A distinctive portrait of the Fab Four by one of the sharpest and
wittiest writers of our time
**
If you want to know what it was like to live those extraordinary Beatles
years in real time, read this book. --Alan Johnson, The Spectator**
Though fifty years have passed since the breakup of the Beatles, the fab
four continue to occupy an utterly unique place in popular culture.
Their influence extends far beyond music and into realms as diverse as
fashion and fine art, sexual politics and religion. When they appeared
on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, fresh off the plane from England,
they provoked an epidemic of hoarse-throated fandom that continues to
this day.
Who better, then, to capture the Beatles phenomenon than Craig
Brown--the inimitable author of Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess
Margaret and master chronicler of the foibles and foppishness of
British high society? This wide-ranging portrait of the four lads from
Liverpool rivals the unique spectacle of the band itself by delving into
a vast catalog of heretofore unexamined lore.
When actress Eleanor Bron touched down at Heathrow with the Beatles, she
thought that a flock of starlings had alighted on the roof of the
terminal--only to discover that the birds were in fact young women
screaming at the top of their lungs. One journalist, mistaken for Paul
McCartney as he trailed the band in his car, found himself nearly
crushed to death as fans climbed atop the vehicle and pressed their
bodies against the windshield. Or what about the Baptist preacher who
claimed that the Beatles synchronized their songs with the rhythm of an
infant's heartbeat so as to induce a hypnotic state in listeners? And
just how many people have employed the services of a Canadian dentist
who bought John Lennon's tooth at auction, extracted its DNA, and now
offers paternity tests to those hoping to sue his estate?
150 Glimpses of the Beatles is, above all, a distinctively
kaleidoscopic examination of the Beatles' effect on the world around
them and the world they helped bring into being. Part anthropology and
part memoir, and enriched by the recollections of everyone from Tom
Hanks to Bruce Springsteen, this book is a humorous, elegiac, and at
times madcap take on the Beatles' role in the making of the sixties and
of music as we know it.
