It took me a long time to read this book - so long, in fact, I went back to the beginning and started it again, reading most of the first half twice. It has an interesting framework - 150 vignettes, many of which are very thinly connected, told in a roughly but not entirely chronological order - that contributes to it being both a little addictive and a little easy to forget once you put it down. It's a sort of attention-deficit writing; you can practically hear the "WHOOSH" from the TV series Lost as it veers backward, forward, and sideways in time.

It also takes a while to fully recognize what Brown's doing, or perhaps one might say the nature of his implicit thesis. This is a book about celebrity - about how it elevates normal, everyday people, changes how other people react to them, makes them into people they never would have been. Most of all, it's about the flame of celebrity and the peripheral figures who get their wings burnt by it. That's interesting - I'm not sure it's 650 pages of interesting, though.

Many of the vignettes revolve around specific people, and several of them will be familiar to stalwart fans, especially in the second half of the book: the Maharishi, "Magic" Alex, the policeman who broke up the rooftop concert, and of course, Yoko. The more surprising stories show up toward the beginning of the book, including anecdotes I've never read from Hamburg, encounters with Noel Coward and Malcolm Muggeridge, and some of the Beatles' earliest public appearances as chart-toppers. It's all very readable and often related in a cheerful, quirky tone that fits the cover design. The longer you go on, though, the more of a picture of destruction and chaos builds, including some openly seedy chapters that veer toward tabloid journalism (I'm thinking specifically of the second Ronnie Spector section). It's a strange book in that you often feel drawn to read it but feel just that little bit unclean afterward.

As others have also pointed out, Brown also gives the National Trust and their "preservation" of the Beatle homes a right kicking - not entirely unjustified, but the sneering sarcasm in those chapters, and a couple others involving his tourist adventures, is laid on very thick.

At the end of the day I'm not totally sure what to make of One Two Three Four. It makes a worthwhile point, and I think it's good reading if you're a fan of the Beatles and you know a few (but not all) of these stories - you'll learn more about what happened to Jimmie Nicol, for instance. Some of the vignettes are really funny, like the letters received by Ringo from fangirls, and some of them are joyous, like the multiple perspectives that combine to tell the story of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. The book ultimately trends toward melancholy, though - it's hard to get around the point he makes about Brian Epstein in the framing story, for instance - and while I'm in no way suggesting a book needs to stay cheerful and upbeat all the time, it feels like an awful lot of pages to reinforce a position that's pretty obvious by half the way through. ( )

Fascinating drawing together of disparate sources to present a detailed picture of the rise of the Beatles, their personalities, their immediate entourage and the impact on society. As a teenager in the mid-60s I was an observer of the period, but only fleetingly aware of the impact the Beatles were having. ( )

A vastly entertaining, eclectic, round the houses biography of The Beatles and their meteoric rise to fame. I'm not really a Beatles fan and Craig Brown's ode to the Fab Four is over 600 pages long, but I enjoyed every page!

The author's acknowledgments could fill a library, from Hunter Davies to Len Garry from The Quarrymen, yet his style is so quirky - and the chapters so brief - that the regurgitated timeline feels more like a series of random anecdotes instead. In between the potted biographies and standard Beatles milestones - drug references in songs, rumours of Paul's death, Yoko Ono - there are also quirky 'what if?' chapters and A LOT about the teenage fans. In fact, Brown is so irreverent at times that he almost had me believing that The Beatles were merely the first boy band, like Westlife or One Direction. So many obnoxious teenage girls - no wonder the four of them gave up touring!

I can't speak for dedicated Beatles fans, but this is a great introduction for others like myself, who like the music but can still learn something new from a fresh take on John, Paul, George and Ringo (and Brian!) ( )

Brilliant. Possibly the best biography I've read, of anyone. Even non-fans will find it hugely entertaining.

150 extremely readable anecdotes, observations and digressions about the Beatles, set out in a broadly chronological order allowing the reader to form their own mental image and impressions from this collage of stories and a few pictures.

Chapters 4 and 6 detail the author’s trips to the childhood homes of Paul and John, which are now owned by the National Trust (a heritage charity). As has been remarked elsewhere, these are really strange chapters about protective attitude of the two guides who showed Brown around the properties to the information they provided. At this point Brown would have been better off describing the properties more fully, as although they would have been clear to visualise for most British readers, as there are still thousands of similar properties in the UK, this will not necessarily have be the case for non-British readers.

Brown uses a strange “what if?” structure of “b” endings to some of his chapters considering how history would have been different if some outcome had changed, for example chapter 9 posits the idea that Paul might not have befriended George and introduced him to the band, if Paul had not been held back a year at school after failing a Latin exam. There is also a chapter imagining if Gerry and the Pacemakers became the biggest stars, and the Beatles a tribute act, with Ringo going off to own a chain of hairdressers. These are to show the contingency of life, rather than its inevitability, but then that’s life.

There are many humorous anecdotes well told which had me leaving the room as I was annoying my better half.. Chapter 55 about Ringo is delightful and hilarious, with quotes such as:
Alone of all the Beatles, Ringo possessed no talent for composing. But one day, in a sudden flash of inspiration, the germs of a song entered his head, as if from nowhere. He worked on the song for three hours, and presented it to the other three the next day. After an awkward silence, they felt obliged to point out that it had already been written and recorded by Bob Dylan.

I am not sure that there is anything original in this book, but having never read about the Beatles before, and always having had their music as the background of my musical life (born too late to hear them “fresh“), I found this hugely informative and generally enjoyable. Just sometimes the author’s personality shows through, and it can be mean spirited, which takes the shine off the book as a whole. ( )