Ticket to joy The Beatles story you never knew you needed

There have been many books on the Fab Four but this is a masterpiece

- DYLAN JONES

I have in my possession, something like 200 books about the Beatles. I pick them up absentmindedly from secondhand stores and junk shops, carefully placing them in the vast section of my library that is devoted to the greatest band that ever lived. These books are like the story of the Beatles' narrative itself, part of a continuum that will never end, not as long as there are people around to tell the story. Because the story is always changing.

Since the first Beatles books, produced to capitalise on a success that even the band themselves thought would be short-lived, there have been some classic texts, books that seem definitive, that manage to interpret the Mop Tops' story in ways that arrive inviolate, and assume the mantle of sacred texts. For ages, we assumed that Love Me Do: The Beatles' Progress by Michael Braun (1964) would never be bettered, until of course along came Hunter Davies's mesmerising authorised biography four years later. Then, in 1972 there was The Longest Cocktail Party by Richard DiLello, which catalogued the dying days of Apple with alarming finesse (and which for years was my favourite Beatles book). In 1981, Philip Norman, the great Sunday Times writer, delivered Shout!, a book which, apart from its decidedly pro-John Lennon bias, was the most comprehensive account thus far.