Lord's Day May 312026

A large congregation and then a small one as is ouor patern on the last day of the month, as we continued through Luke morning and evening. We looked at the Last Suppr and the disciples' argument over who was the greatest.

Two Books about the Beatles

One of my sons likes to buy me books on the Beatles and the Nazis (two subjects I find pretty compelling). For my recent birthday, he got me John and Paul by Ian Leslie. I read this well written book that focusses on John and Paul and their relationship, especially in song writing, close after completing a previous book on the Beatles so I noticed what was in the previous book and what was missing. Truth is the Beatles are so well documented and there are so many disputes over certain stories that it is difficult to keep up. Very interesting stab this, which I enjoyed reading. Leslie suggests that with his marriage to Linda, Paul switched from being markedly promiscuous to being markedly monogamous, which he puts down to love of extremes, probably correctly. Ian Leslie is a champion of Paul over John but tries to be fair. I still find myself wanting to favour John, even though he was clearly a monster in many respects. I guess they are both very talented people with huge flaws whose relationship with one another is tangled and full of fascination. The book contains an interesting bibliography so I am in danger of spending even more time on this subject if I am not careful.

I was very drawn to the other book because it deals with The Beatles who I love to read about and Bob Dylan, who I know much less about but who draws me for several reasons. I also like the way journalists write books. Like scholars, they make a through search then collate and write. Unlike scholars, of course, they make it interesting. I knew a lot of the stuff in this book, I guess, but by no means all of it and some of it I had forgottenn, including John Lennon's born again phase. I had also not appreciated how conservative Dylan was from the beginning, despite his way of presenting himself. The book is full of fornication and drug taking, inevitably, and also an unsual amount of throwing up, usually missing from such books. Anyway, the book gives a fairly complete history of two incredible phenomena of the sixties and beyond and where their paths crossed. Fascinating.