Four Moptop Yobbos

Ian Penman, 17 June 2021

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time 
by Craig Brown.
Fourth Estate, 642 pp., £9.99, March, 978 0 00 834003 2
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The Beatles and Sixties Britain 
by Marcus Collins.
Cambridge, 382 pp., £90, March 2020, 978 1 108 47724 6
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The Beatles in Context 
edited by Kenneth Womack.
Cambridge, 372 pp., £74.99, January 2020, 978 1 108 41911 6
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... seem beyond belief.As in his wonderful Ma’am Darling (a collagist’s journey around Princess Margaret), Brown deploys seemingly throwaway footnotes as peepholes into history. All the expected players are here – Bob Dylan, the Stones, Phil Spector – but also the Duchess of Windsor, Noël Coward, Peter Stringfellow, Malcolm Sargent, Beryl ...

Is this fascism?

Daniel Trilling, 5 June 2025

Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilisation 
by Richard Seymour.
Verso, 280 pp., £20, October 2024, 978 1 80429 425 3
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... what’s really going on. Trump, for instance, wants to abolish birthright citizenship in the US. Margaret Thatcher did this in the UK forty years ago. Are both of these decisions fascist, or neither – or is there something qualitatively different about Trump’s actions? Does it even matter whether we have an answer to the question ‘Is this fascism?’It ...