Christopher Bray
Penny Lane
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles
By Peter Doggett
The Bodley Head 390pp £18.99
‘Of course we aren’t just four fellows,’ Paul McCartney told Life magazine a year or so after the Beatles’ final bust-up. ‘We are part of a big business machine.’ Four decades on, the big business machine still rumbles, spewing DVD box sets here, high-gloss, supercalendered, four-colour oral histories there. A few weeks back the Fabs became the subject of a play-along video game: The Beatles: Rock Band. At the same time, their back catalogue was finally re-released on a series of digitally remastered CDs. Why, in these days when even relatively new albums are back on the racks with extra material and ritzier covers mere months after their original release, the delay?
The answer is implicit in Peter Doggett’s You Never Give Me Your Money, a clinically precise account of the internecine financial wars those four fellows (and/or their widows) have been fighting since their very public split. Energetically told, it is a dispiriting tale from which anyone who still
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Under its longest-serving editor, Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair was that rare thing – a New York society magazine that published serious journalism.
@PeterPeteryork looks at what Carter got right.
Peter York - Deluxe Editions
Peter York: Deluxe Editions - When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines by Graydon Carter
literaryreview.co.uk
Henry James returned to America in 1904 with three objectives: to see his brother William, to deliver a series of lectures on Balzac, and to gather material for a pair of books about modern America.
Peter Rose follows James out west.
Peter Rose - The Restless Analyst
Peter Rose: The Restless Analyst - Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age by Peter Brooks...
literaryreview.co.uk
Vladimir Putin served his apprenticeship in the KGB toward the end of the Cold War, a period during which Western societies were infiltrated by so-called 'illegals'.
Piers Brendon examines how the culture of Soviet spycraft shaped his thinking.
Piers Brendon - Tinker, Tailor, Sleeper, Troll
Piers Brendon: Tinker, Tailor, Sleeper, Troll - The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West by Shaun Walker
literaryreview.co.uk