... riveting.

...often witty.

...he prises the basic story away from its standard telling, and delights in a motley supporting cast united by their brushes with Beatledom.

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.

Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four: The Beatles In Time is equal parts social history, oral history, memoir and conventional pop biography. Its scope is kaleidoscopic.

One Two Three Four is such a ridiculously enjoyable treat.

One Two Three Four begins and ends with Paul McCartney counting in the band on stage at the Cavern Club in 1961. In between is a brilliantly executed study of cultural time, social space and the madness of fame.

One Two Three Four, published to coincide with the 50th anniversary, on 10 April, of the break-up of The Beatles, is an exploded biography of the band. It is a critical appreciation, a personal history, a miscellany, a work of scholarship and speculation, and a tribute.

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.

Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, the latest to enter the crowded library of Beatles books, is not a biography so much as a group portrait in vignettes, a rearrangement of stories and legends whose trick is to make them gleam anew.

Even at 600-plus pages this is a condensed version of a uniquely fascinating story. It’s characterised by a nicely British dryness.

... interesting and eclectic.

... a magical mystery tour that ends where it began — with Brian Epstein making his way down the 18 steps that led into the Cavern to hear John, Paul, George and — er Pete (yet to be replaced by Ringo) for the first time.

The short form is Brown’s strong suit so these post-biographies (or postcard biographies: chapters are divided into even smaller fragments) are mosaics, like a portrait made up of many photos.

Over the past 50 years, there has been a vast outpouring of Beatles books.

... wildly imaginative and tremendously entertaining.

... overstuffed.

There are many twists and turns in this addictive, immersive, funny, bizarre, silly, poignant, weird, and amazing mix of biography and cultural history.

[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.

These well-chosen vignettes aptly illuminate the Beatles’ personalities along with the cultural chord they struck, and Brown knits them into an interpretation that’s both perceptive and hilariously pithy.