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single wall. To feed this insatiable appetite I myself must have written the equivalent of another couple of biographies in newspaper and magazine articles, commentaries, reviews, reconstructions, and obituaries, and spoken at least a further one aloud in radio and television interviews. Like it or not, I am tagged as a Beatles “expert” for good and all. I have come to dread the light that springs into people’s eyes at parties when the only alternative to clamlike rudeness on my part is to admit I’ve written a book about the Beatles. I know that from here on I shall be allowed to talk about nothing else.
    They are, after Winston Churchill, the twentieth century’s greatest standard-bearer for Britain. When we look back over that lowering and ugly hundred years, only two moments give rise to genuine collective national pride: the one in 1940 when we stood alone against Hitler, and the one in the barely formed sixties when four cheeky-faced boys from Liverpool recolonized the world in our name. At times, indeed, they seem to be all we have left as everything once valued about this country slides deeper into neglect and anarchy. Our streets may be overrun by muggers and carjackers, our public transportation a homicidal mess, our hospitals uncaring Third World slums, our schools devalued, our legal system a joke, our police force in retreat, our royal family in ruins. But nothing, it seems, can ever tarnish the glory that was John, Paul, George, and Ringo.
    At the start of their career they were mocked for choosing a name that suggested an insect. Perhaps the ultimate sign of their fame is that now in the English language, wherever spoken, a small black creepy-crawlie is, by a long way, only the second image the word “beetle” calls to mind.
    Their longevity testifies, of course, to the residual power of the generation that grew up with them: the Chelsea-booted boys and Bibafrocked girls who would one day metamorphose into presidents, prime ministers, captains of industry, television bosses, and newspaper editors. Virtually every Briton and American now in their fifties looks back to the same goldenly privileged mid-sixties youth and cherishes the same clutch of Lennon-McCartney songs, above all, as mementoes of that gorgeous time. Forty years on, shapeless, wrinkled, and balding though they may be, they still find it inconceivable that any other generationcould embody the state of being young more perfectly than themselves. Hence, the post-sixties culture that compels no one to yield to anno Domini , where even old-age pensioners can still cling to their bath-shrunk Levis and ponytails and miniskirts. To this worldwide realm of eternal teenagerdom, there is no more instantaneous passport than a Beatles tune.
    Yet, immense though the nostalgia market is, it represents only a part of their global constituency. Billions adore them who had no share in their radiant heyday—who, in many cases, were not even born when they ceased to exist as a band. First-generation fans may well smile to recollect how furiously they rejected the pop idols of their own parents; how being a Beatles fan in the early days meant facing a constant barrage of adult disapproval and contempt. Back in the early sixties it would have been extraordinary for a young pop addict to share his or her grandparents’ fondness for some hit-maker of three decades before, like Harry Roy or Debroy Somers and the Savoy Orpheans. Yet today, grandparents and grandchildren listen to Revolver , say, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with the same unreserved delight.
    Most potently of all, perhaps, the Beatles are the so-called “Swinging Sixties” incarnate. Britain has a long tradition of spinning history into fantasy worlds—theme parks of the mind, one might call them—from the knights and damsels of Henry V and the lute-playing buccaneers of Good Queen Bess through the posthorns and stagecoaches of Dickens to the Naughty Nineties, the Roaring