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OK, I brought this one on myself obviously, and shouldn't complain. I had got some kind of sense through the ether that this book would be different and it was critically acclaimed etc. Also, all I really wanted was, as per the Late Shift book, something I could listen to that would fill the gaps between my usual podcasts. But to my mind Brown makes some really big stupid errors early on that completely put me offside (let's put aside the fact that this book is read by three people and they all put on funny German, Liverpudlian etc accents - that's on Audible not Craig Brown). Obviously if I was to be utterly fair to CB I would invest the full 18 hours 46 minutes I still have to go with this work and then make a pronouncement. Instead, these are the reasons I'm writing this one off and going on to something else (btw Audible now makes it impossible to delete things - you make one purchase you live with it forever apparently): 

(1) I don't know how far I am in to the work but over an hour and already he has committed, well, not a cardinal sin but one of the stupidest errors anyone writing history can do, IMO. Relaying the various (admittedly fairly famous, so maybe you figure you have to do something with the incontrovertible facts of the biographies of the Beatles) milestones in Beatle lives, he has so far posited two 'scenario A' and 'scenario B' situations where, for instance, Paul passes Latin at school and goes on to a university career, or, Paul doesn't pass Latin and stays down a year (that's what happened) and is suddenly in the same year as, and befriends, George Harrison. I would like to posit a scenario C: the comet which created the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event hits another piece of space rock in the asteroid belt instead and smashes to bits there, and so evolution on Earth is not impacted by mass extinction in the way that the Earth experienced it in our current timeline, and Louise Harrison gets rostered on to work at the shop on the night of June 1942 when she and Harold would otherwise have conceived a boring and grumpy guitarist. The impacts on the Travelling Wilburys are minimal. 

I understand (I think) why Brown goes for this stupid approach - he wants us to understand that the universe is random whimsy. But once you unleash that genie you are fucked, Craig. There are literally infinite ways to go. 

(2) The early part of the book is an account of CB going to visit Lennon's and McCartney's childhood homes, wherein CB goes on a big riff on how stupid it is that the National Trust UK has accumulated representative household items from the 1950s-60s to make the houses look as they did the day the lads wrote 'I Saw Her Standing There' (or whatever). It is not clear what he would have preferred, but the message is seems to be 'this isn't history unless this is really Mimi's wooden spoon'. He goes into big detail about the Beatles industry (like he's not, and we his readers are not, buying into that shizzle here and now) and then relates his unease about being caught surreptitiously recording the tour guides and then how he then decides to take notes and gets told off for it. Hey, since I am not going to read/listen to the rest of the book, I shouldn't pronounce but seriously the disrespect he has for the whole situation and the people involved does not make him come out shiny and pristine. 

Btw he then goes to Hamburg and does another Beatles tour and this time we get (as mentioned, this is not CB's fault) interminably extensive parody German accent as some guy who's been making a living (presumably) from being a Beatles in Hamburg tour guide for fifty years (not an exaggeration, he's been doing it since 1970) goes through the motions. This is where I stopped. 

Now I've written it down I feel maybe I'm missing out on a very fine set up for something bigger but fuck it even though I just wanted something to listen to while I stacked the dishwasher I can't take it anymore. Particularly the accents.