But are we as eager to know the exact route taken by Harry (born 1937, favourite football team West Ham, favourite singer Sarah Vaughan) when he was lugging it back to Liverpool (Romford to Liverpool Street, then Circle Line to Euston Square and walk to Euston mainline station for the train to Lime Street, followed by a taxi to Dingle)? Lewisohn is so conscientious that he even includes the details he has failed to find out. There are those of us who will be intrigued to learn that Ringo’s stepfather Harry Graves bought Ringo his first set of drums in Romford for £10 in 1957. But do you really need to know that it was a second-hand two-door blue Ford Anglia 105E Deluxe, bought by George from Brian Epstein’s friend Terry Doran who worked at a car dealership in Warrington? For instance, you may well want to know that George Harrison’s first car was a Ford Anglia.

It is, by any measure, an extraordinary achievement, but the detail sometimes threatens to smother the whole. Lewisohn is now 62, and expects to be well into his seventies before his trilogy is complete. The extended version runs to 1698 pages, and only takes the Beatles up to the end of 1962, and the recording of Love Me Do. Ten years later, he published the first volume. In 2003, at the age of 45, Mark Lewisohn began researching a history of the Beatles. It was 548 pages long, and took Picasso up to the age of 25. John Richardson published the first volume of his biography of Pablo Picasso in 1991.

Will he live long enough to reach the end? Caro is still trying to complete the fifth and final volume, which will take LBJ from 1964 to his death in 1973.

The audiobook for that one alone takes 32 hours 45 minutes. Each volume is roughly 800,000 words he published volume 4 in 2012. Caro has been working on his biography of LBJ since the mid-1970s. Robert Caro’s biography of President Johnson is so vast that it makes Bailey’s Roth look like a haiku. Even the longest biography is but a tiny fraction of the life it is intended to chronicle. Roth was 85 when he died, so his real life ran to a total of 750,000 hours or so. It takes a total of 31 hours and 46 minutes to listen to on audiobook.

One of the longest biographies of recent years, the ill-fated Philip Roth by Blake Bailey, runs to 800 pages. This talk was delivered at the 2019 Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Mark lewisohn volume 2