Named a Best Book of 2020 by The Economist , The Evening Standard, The Guardian, The Paris Review , The Spectator, The Telegraph, TIME and The Times (UK) “Time-play and what-ifs are part of Brown’s formidable bag of tricks, deployed to add emotional range and a poignant twist to his comic vignettes. His biographical method—combining fragments, lists, excerpts, quotes and flights of whimsy—is executed as brilliantly here as in 2017’s glittering Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret . . . Brown’s book is an idiosyncratic cocktail of oral history, personal memoir, tourism and biography." —Charles Arrowsmith, The Washington Post "Brown, a perceptive writer and a gifted satirist, makes familiar stories fresh. Along the way he unearths many fascinating tidbits . . . a fascinating study of the cultural and social upheaval created by the band." —Moira Hodgson, The Wall Street Journal "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 . . . I loved every word of it." — Dominic Sandbrook, The Sunday Times "The perfect antidote to these times." —Julian Barnes, The Guardian “The author of the highly entertaining Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret (the princess makes an appearance in these pages, too) eschews a linear narrative in favor of correspondence, imagined outcomes that never came to pass and cascades of interviews to convey the singular cultural importance of the Beatles. This is the biography for anyone who’s wondered which Beatle Fran Lebowitz liked best. (Ringo Starr—‘the contrarian position,’ she says.)" —Joumana Khatib, The New York Times "A brilliantly executed study of cultural time, social space and the madness of fame . . . The exceptional strangeness of the Beatles reflects the ordinary oddity of real life. [150 Glimpses of the Beatles ], 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." —Dominic Green, Literary Review "Pure joy . . . The most engaging, most surprising, most thought-provoking and purely enjoyable book I’ve read in ages. Brown has as many ways to tell a story as the Beatles had to write a song . . . If you read this book, a splendid time is guaranteed” — Frank Cottrell-Boyce, The Tablet "For those of us, like me, who are fans of [Craig Brown], 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. The result is the terrific [150 Glimpses of the Beatles ] . . . It 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." —Alex Bilmes, Esquire "One of the best books I’ve read on any subject in a good while . . . In much the same way that the Beatles musically recreated, eulogized, and forever preserved the real Penny Lane in song, 150 Glimpses of the Beatles lets us relive what it was like to happily share the planet for a few years with a band like no other before or since." —Malcolm Jones, The Daily Beast "Magnificent . . . There will be enough written elsewhere about [150 Glimpses of the Beatles '] witty prose, evocative mosaic structure and granular detail; the book is everything (wistful, imaginative, passionate) that Danny Boyle’s Beatles film Yesterday should have been but manifestly was not . . . As lush and layered as a jumbo box of chocolates. The effect it has had is to send me spinning off into Beatles heaven." —New Statesman "[150 Glimpses of the Beatles ] is perfect for now. It’s ingenious, wholly original (not a given, what with the subject matter), absolutely gripping, funny, sad and moving. A complete treat." — India Knight, The Sunday Times "Craig Brown has written a long book about the Beatles—no book by Craig Brown is too long. Ringo is a friend of mine—I met him 30 years ago at Billy Connolly’s wedding on a snake-infested island near Fiji—but 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, Daily Telegraph “Three years ago, Craig Brown invented a brilliant new form of biography with his 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret . . . Brown ends with a delicious quote from Bryan Magee, the philosopher and politician, written in l967: “Does anyone seriously believe that the Beatles’ music will be an unthinkingly accepted part of daily life all over the world in the 2000s?” To which the obvious answer is, “yeah, yeah, yeah”. And Craig Brown has found a vastly entertaining way of celebrating it.” —Lynn Barber, Sunday Telegraph "In this enthralling, impressionistic biography, Craig Brown examines the immense cultural impact of the Beatles 50 years on from their split. Rather than a linear retelling, he reflects and refracts the sometimes disputed legend of the Fab Four through external characters and incidental details, 'what if' chapters and personal reminiscences. This method worked a treat in [99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret ] and it works even better here because the material is so much richer." —Nick Curtis, Evening Standard “As a fan of Craig Brown’s writing, as well as of the Beatles’ music, I was trying to manage my expectations of One Two Three Four. I need not have worried. It is not only as affectionately teasing as you would hope, but also fascinating and funny.” —Nigel Farndale, The Times (London) "A magical mystery tour . . . 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." — Alan Johnson, The Spectator
★ 09/01/2020
As the comprehensive bibliography to Brown's book makes clear, the vast number of Beatles biographies has resulted in a diverse and crowded field. With excellent works from Philip Norman, Bob Spitz, Hunter Davies, and Mark Lewisohn, it's easy to wonder if there is a place for another book about the Beatles. In this case the answer is an emphatic yeah, yeah, yeah . Mirroring his Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret , Brown offers a series of vignettes rather than straightforward biography. The variety of approaches isn't always successful, but there is enough here—personal experience, peripheral characters, witty and often edgy writing—that even old tales feel new, and that is no easy trick. The book occasionally feels like "all of the things they didn't tell you in the Anthology ," and Brown's inclusion of fan writing and personal reminiscence can be a bit much, but he deftly points out the Rashomon quality of much of the history; in one noteworthy segment he provides 14 differing accounts of the fight between John Lennon and Cavern Club DJ Bob Wooler at Paul McCartney's 21st birthday party. VERDICT Brown presents a fresh take on a seemingly inexhaustible subject—Beatles people, you know you should be glad.—Bill Baars, formerly with Lake Oswego P.L., OR
Craig Brown tickled our ear with 99 GLIMPSES OF PRINCESS MARGARET, a brisk, irreverent assembly of tiny chapters that ran a satisfactory 12+ hours. For the Beatles, he adds 51 more glimpses and another eight hours, with a proportionally diluted effect. Brown himself, Kate Robbins, and Mark McGann share the narration, which is interesting, insightful, well performed, and packed with some new and a lot of old information. All of it is shaped by Brown’s propensity for “easing sense into nonsense.” The self-mocking Beatles are harder to deflate than a pretentious princess, but Brown’s accounts of touring Beatles sites in Liverpool and his histories of Beatles contemporaries swept up—and aside—by their spectacular rise will amaze and beguile listeners. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
DECEMBER 2020 - AudioFile
Craig Brown tickled our ear with 99 GLIMPSES OF PRINCESS MARGARET, a brisk, irreverent assembly of tiny chapters that ran a satisfactory 12+ hours. For the Beatles, he adds 51 more glimpses and another eight hours, with a proportionally diluted effect. Brown himself, Kate Robbins, and Mark McGann share the narration, which is interesting, insightful, well performed, and packed with some new and a lot of old information. All of it is shaped by Brown’s propensity for “easing sense into nonsense.” The self-mocking Beatles are harder to deflate than a pretentious princess, but Brown’s accounts of touring Beatles sites in Liverpool and his histories of Beatles contemporaries swept up—and aside—by their spectacular rise will amaze and beguile listeners. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
DECEMBER 2020 - AudioFile
2020-08-18 An overstuffed gathering of Beatlemania, an evergreen subject.
Who knew that Paul McCartney wrote “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” after watching “a couple of monkeys copulating en plein air ” in Rishikesh? Or that John Lennon hesitated to let Paul join his band since Paul could play and might jeopardize his leadership? Brown, whose last book was an award-wining biography of Princess Margaret, serves up 150 episodes, most running just a few pages, concerning the lives and work of the Beatles, with poor Ringo, as ever, mostly an afterthought. (The author quotes American writer Carolyn See to deem the drummer “patron saint of fuckups the world over.”) Brown is not an uncritical worshipper, but when he does criticize, it’s seldom fresh. He observes, as have so many, that John and Paul needed each other as creative foils and competitors and that when they separated, their solo work suffered, “with John falling back on self-pity and Paul giving in to whimsy.” Still, there are some little-known moments here, as when Kingsley Amis railed, “Oh fuck the Beatles” in a bitter letter to Philip Larkin, attaching a nasty racist epithet to Yoko Ono in passing. Another example is when Brown describes the Maharishi’s retreat in India, which, thanks to the tobacco heiress Doris Duke, was “far from spartan,” though conducive enough to feelings of spiritual exaltation that John was reduced to writing “hippy-dippy lyrics” that later resolved into such self-doubting tunes as “Jealous Guy.” Collectors of all things Beatles will relish Brown’s description of their first time getting high, courtesy of Bob Dylan, who is “an enthusiast for visiting sites associated with rock stars,” touring John’s boyhood home after the National Trust acquired it. The author sometimes second-guesses, as when he decries the cover of Abbey Road , the quartet “generally looking as if they couldn’t be arsed,” but allows that it has since become iconic and often imitated, like the Beatles themselves.
Light on brand-new news but a pleasure for Fab Four completists.