Lennon says, inter alia, "Actually, our best days were before we got that big, when we used to play for hours in clubs. My favourite number was always Elvis’s Baby Let’s Play House. We’d make it last about ten minutes, singing the same verse over and over. I pinched one of the lines from it later to put in one of my own songs called Run for Your Life - something about ‘I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to see you with another man’. "Mick Jagger said we weren’t a good band as performers. But he never saw us at our best in Liverpool and Hamburg. We were the best bloody band there was. I know all the early rock songs much better than most of those I’ve written myself."

During most of that time, however, John was in iconoclastic mode. It was as though, having made his decision, he couldn’t smash his Beatle persona quickly, or outrageously, enough. He didn’t want to be "one of four gods on the stage", he told me, so instead he invited the world’s press to his honeymoon bedside for a week "in aid of world peace". Then, not minding that he was being widely ridiculed, not to mention chastised by his formidable Aunt Mimi for "making an exhibition of himself", he appeared naked with Yoko on an album of electronic music called Two Virgins, before really chasing controversy with a series of erotic lithographs featuring Yoko, and sometimes himself too. ...

On another occasion, talking about his song Not a Second Time from the Beatles’ second LP, in a conversation devoted to his music, he says: "That was the one where that f***ing idiot Thomas Mann (he meant William Mann, the Times music critic) talked about the aeolian cadence at the end being like Mahler’s Song of the Earth. They were just chords like any other chords. It was the first intellectual bullshit written about us." Then the knowing pause. "Still, I know it helps to have bullshit written about you." Later, saying how a favourite of his songs, You Can’t Do That, was his attempt at being Wilson Pickett, he becomes mock-anguished when admitting it was "a flip side because Can’t Buy Me Love [Paul’s song] was so f***ing good".

He was competitive with Paul, yes, and, when relations between the two were really bad, vituperative, as evidenced in a line in a song about his former partner on his Imagine album: "The sound you make is Muzak to my ears." Paul had to have been hurt, and a few months later in New York even John would admit slightly ruefully: "I suppose it was a bit hard on him…" But, as he would so often say, "They were just the words that came out of my mouth at the time." In truth, he always knew how good Paul was, without necessarily liking everything he did." Much more at:

The future of the Internet and broadband

Robert Atkinson, Richard Bennett from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation have issued a report stating that "After 35 years of use, the internet is reaching its design limits. The next 35 years of networking require a new architecture that can maintain the accepted services such as the Web as well as innovative new services that haven't yet been deployed."

Les rosbifs abroad

Richard Davenport-Hines in the UK Times Literary Supplement reviews a book on how the "British "discovered" Europe in the nineteenth century, and duly invaded it, with mackintoshes, three-decker novels and knickerbockers."

"Richard Mullen and James Munson have written an account of the distaste, enthusiasm, courage, petulance, joys and trials of British tourists and travellers - les rosbifs, as some French called them - in the century between the Battle of Waterloo and the pistol shots at Sarajevo. It is a tale of tourists who visit morgues, slaughterhouses, mental asylums and electro-plating demonstrations as well as paintings in the Louvre, Passion plays at Oberammergau and the spa at Marienbad. The teeming cast of characters include a washerwoman known as Rosette L’Amour, a governess named Miss Freelove, and a restaurant critic called Algernon Bastard.

Why did the British travel so inveterately when their journeys entailed expense, discomfort, vexation, even danger? Many sought warm climes or Alpine air to rally their health. Others who were in financial straits settled abroad in order to retrench their outgoings. Some souls travelled to cure melancholy or forget disappointments. Thackeray wrote that he “never landed on Calais pier without feeling that a load of sorrows was left on the other side of the water - and have always fancied that black care stepped on board the [returning] steamer . . . at Gravesend”. A few went abroad to avoid prosecution for sodomy, or to find amenable boys without fear of blackmail. Art treasures inspired connoisseurs, and strenuous types were elated by mountaineering in Switzerland or bicycling across Normandy."

A new horizon for the News

The September 24 issue of the New York Review of Books has a long article by Michael Massing on "A New Horizon for the News".

"When it comes to mismanagement, the newspaper business seems in a class with Detroit. Unlike GM, though, newspapers offer a product that consumers still value. But how to cash in on it? As the old business models fade, new ones are urgently being tested. Surveying the blackened landscape, I searched for new buds-and stumbled upon something much larger."

Book lending

Sir Peter Stothard, former Editor of the Times Literary Supplement, reflects in his blog, on the best book loan in literary history

"I offered to lend a friend a book today.

He refused. Borrowing was too much trouble. Or rather returning borrowed books was too much trouble.

It never did anyone any good, he said.

'Neither borrower nor lender be' was a motto especially appropriate to literature.

I started to protest that one of the greatest poems in English had resulted from a borrowed book - and not a just a book from any lender but from a lender who was a journalist on The Times.

I tried to tell him about the suicide of Thomas Alasager in 1846 but he was already on line to Amazon.

Thomas Massa Alsager was one of those 19th-century newspaper figures whose versatility puts every one of us, his modern successors, to shame. He was a manager, a music critic, a city editor, an advertising salesman and he was also midwife to John Keats's sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.

He lent Keats the book.

It was in 1816 when Keats looked for the first time into a translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey by George Chapman, the Jacobean poet and dramatist.

Chapman's grand barbarism, as has often been recounted, was in shocking contrast to the refined Homeric lines of Alexander Pope, the ``smooth little toys'' on which Keats and his friends had been brought up.

Chapman's Homer lit a beacon for Romantic poetry. So the actual copy of Chapman's Homer, the one which made possible this transforming work for Keats and for English letters, was one of the most important book borrowings of all time.......

Another publishers archive goes online

Following the reference to Faber in last week's blog, to mark sixty-years of independent publishing at Peter Owen, the company will open its unique literary archive to the public.

"Peter Owen began his firm from a bedroom in Kensington in 1951, with his typewriter as his sole literary tool. His company survived through many a recession without any outside investment, simply through the publication of high quality books by some of the most dynamic, and prolific authors in post-war 20th century literature.

These include writers such as Yukio Mishima, Hermann Hesse, Paul and Jane Bowles, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, Jean Cocteau, Shusaku Endo, Doris Lessing, Salvador Dali, Muriel Spark (his first editor), Anais Nin and many more.

The current office in Earl’s Court is like a private literary museum, containing letters, contracts, manuscripts, rare copies and even paintings from the above figures."

To browse some of Peter Owen’s finest first editions, please visit: http://www.peterowen.com/rare.htm l

ODD BOOK TITLE OF THE WEEK

Pigs I Have Known, By Sacha Carnegie. Peter Davies. 1958.

Libraries Australia reports holdings at: http://nla.gov.au/anbd.bib-an8701 349.