Glimpsing The Beatles, Bill Maher, Margaret Thatcher, and — above all! — Craig Brown.

I read Craig Brown's "Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret" — as I noted here — so the minute I see that he's got a new book, "150 Glimpses of the Beatles," I put it in my Kindle. Nothing more is needed to get me. It's Craig Brown! And The Beatles.

But I'm interested to see what Bill Maher — of all people — has to say about it in the New York Times. Let's read this:

I like the old stories — frankly, if I wanted something challenging to read, I wouldn’t be reading “150 Glimpses of the Beatles.”... Glimpse No. 53 begins: “For Christmas 1964, when I was 7, my brothers and I were given Beatles wigs by our parents.” If you change 7 to 8 and brothers to sister, I could have written the exact same sentence. So I knew I was disposed to like this book — and I did.... 

For this reader, when Brown tells one of the Beatle stories I’ve heard many times and now adds information I didn’t know — or the telling detail that was missing for 50 years — the book is an utter delight. I knew the Beatles were introduced to LSD by their dentist, but now I know exactly who that guy was and how that night unfolded (if you can trust a 55-year-old account from people who were tripping for the first time). The Dylan-turns-them-on-to-pot-for-the-first-time scene, which all Beatlephiles know, also comes to life now in a way it never had before.... 

[T]here’s... a really annoying reimagining of history where it was Gerry and the Pacemakers who made it big, and the Beatles who were a footnote in musical history.... And there’s a book within the book about how it turned out for ex-Beatles Stu and Pete, Beatle-for-a-week Jimmie Nicol, the long-suffering, Hera-like Cynthia Lennon, and other supporting cast members and day players caught in the orbit of the sun gods.... Would it have been better if it were 99 glimpses and I didn’t have to wade through glimpsing Margaret Thatcher, or who was standing inadvertently in the background of the “Abbey Road” cover, or whatever happened to the Singing Nun? Yes, I think it would....

Then you don't really get Craig Brown... like I do! That stuff is the whole point! It's kind of the very thing that makes me love blogging. It's all that extra stuff and giving yourself the freedom to go there and there and there. Was Margaret Thatcher standing inadvertently in the background of the “Abbey Road” cover?!? Hell, yeah, I want that in the book I read, which is not just another book about The Beatles. There are thousands of those things out there already. This isn't reading about The Beatles. This is reading Craig Brown. I wouldn't have read a normal book about Princess Margaret! I was reading it because it was Brown's 99 glimpses! So I am up for whatever he wants to glimpse about The Beatles, including Margaret Thatcher.

Oh! I have the book right here on my Kindle. Let's see. From glimpse #68:

On 31 May 1990, six months before being squeezed from office, Margaret Thatcher paid a visit to Abbey Road... [and] posed for photographs, playing the drums in the studio and walking across the famous zebra crossing on the road outside. ‘I loved the songs of the Beatles,’ she told journalists. ‘They were sheer genius both in the way they performed and in some of the songs they wrote. '

But five years into her retirement, she had grown less enamoured of the Beatles’ influence. In her autobiography she complained of ‘a whole “youth culture” of misunderstood Eastern mysticism, bizarre clothing and indulgence in hallucinatory drugs’. ‘I found Chelsea a very different place when we moved back to London in 1970,’ she continued. ‘I had mixed feelings about what was happening. There was vibrancy and talent, but this was also in large degree a world of make-believe. A perverse pride was taken in Britain about our contribution to these trends. Carnaby Street in Soho, the Beatles, the mini-skirt and the maxi-skirt were the new symbols of “Swinging Britain”. And they did indeed prove good export earners. Harold Wilson was adept at taking maximum political credit for them. The trouble was that they concealed the real economic weaknesses which even a talented fashion industry and entrepreneurial recording companies could not counter-balance. As Desmond Donnelly remarked, “My greatest fear is that Britain will sink giggling into the sea.”’