Why does the story of the Beatles and Lennon and McCartney still matter?
John & Paul: A Love Story in Song, Ian Leslie, Faber & Faber £25 Bella Caledonia, 4 April 2025 Gerry Hassan The Beatles story is one of the most enduring, beguiling and seemingly never-ending of our modern age. What else is there to be said? Ian Leslie thinks he has an answer in exploring the relationship, inner workings and chemistry between John Lennon and Paul McCartney - the central axis of the phenomenon that was the Beatles. This is a riveting, well-written account throwing new light on old stones – the band, John and Paul, songwriting and creativity, and the
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When were the Swinging Scottish Sixties?
When were the Swinging Scottish Sixties? Gerry Hassan Scottish Review, March 22nd 2017 The 1960s are referenced throughout the world as a period of immense change, hope, protest and turbulence. There were ‘the winds of change’ of decolonisation, Latin American revolts and rebellions, the Chinese cultural revolution, upsurges in Paris and Prague, Biafra, the disastrous American military intervention in Vietnam and resultant protest movement in the US and worldwide. What though did the sixties really represent? In the UK the sixties began with Philip Larkin and the trial of D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’; in the US they were augmented
