
One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time
One Two Three Four won the Baillie Gifford Prize 2020. A bold and brilliant reinvention of the biography, One Two Three Four interweaves four parallel narratives—one for each Beatle—to tell the story of the band's formation, meteoric rise, and eventual dissolution. Each chapter covers the same time period for all four members, allowing readers to see what John, Paul, George, and Ringo were doing at any given moment—whether together or apart. The result is a revolutionary approach to telling the Beatles' story, one that captures the full complexity and humanity of these four musicians as their lives and careers intertwined and diverged. Tracing their journey from Liverpool to global superstardom, Craig Brown's narrative reveals not just the public moments that defined the band, but also the private struggles, creative tensions, and personal transformations that shaped their music and their relationships with one another.
Buy this book at Amazon- Publisher
- HarperCollins UK
- Year
- 2020
- ISBN-13
- 9780008340025
- Genre
- Biography & Memoir
- Topics
- The BeatlesMusic history1960s pop culture
Awards
- Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-FictionWonMajor(2020)
Other awarded books from Craig Brown
- Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret
If you liked One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, you could also like these

Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time
Hilary Spurling
0 wins · 2 score

The White Album
Joan Didion
0 wins · 8 score

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War
Deborah Cohen
1 win · 5 score

The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Alex Ross
0 wins · 9 score

Backroom Boys
Francis Spufford
0 wins · 3 score

Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts
Robert M. Dowling
0 wins · 3 score

Churchill: Walking with Destiny
Andrew Roberts
0 wins · 2 score

Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm
Dan Charnas
1 win · 5 score

Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin
Myra Friedman
0 wins · 4 score

Churchill: a Biography (about Winston Churchill)
Roy Jenkins
0 wins · 4 score

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
Tony Judt
0 wins · 11 score

My Fourth Time, We Drowned
Sally Hayden
1 win · 8 score

Cut Time: An Education at the Fights
Carlo Rotella
0 wins · 3 score

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
Brad Stone
1 win · 8 score

Beethoven: The Music and the Life
Lewis Lockwood
0 wins · 4 score
