Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties, Third edition

MacDonald illustrates that in the backdrop of an era where this band’s praises were sung to the hilt and beyond, leaving them – now – in the pantheon of eternal recognition, those actual years (the sixties) by themselves have become blurred in that they were and still are flapping in the shadow of the decade before: when the ‘braying upper-class voices on newsreels, the odour of unearned privilege in parliament and the courts, the tired nostalgia for the war, all conspired to breed unrest among the young.’ He depicts what effect the Beatles had on those years in those terms and vice versa, in what is maybe the best book within the survey of this field. Full marks.