We all want to change the world - John Wyse Jackson

John Lennon (1940-80). His career after the break-up of the Beatles was much influenced by his marriage in 1969 to Yoko Ono. The couple became familiar figures in the international protest movement. Give Peace a Chance was recorded during a ‘bed-in’ which they staged in a Montreal hotel in 1969. Of Lennon’s solo work during the 1970s, the most successful album was the 1971 Imagine (particularly its title song); it contained a veiled attack on Paul McCartney in How Do You Sleep? On 8 December 1980 Lennon was shot by a mentally disturbed fan, Mark Chapman, as he and Yoko Ono were entering their New York apartment block. Two books published in his twenties (John Lennon in his Own Write 1964, A Spaniard in the Works 1965) reveal his surrealist talent as a writer - evident also in the lyrics of the Beatles. This biography, published to commemorate the 25th anniversary of his death, focuses on his Irish roots and how this influenced his music, philosophy and attitude to life and politics.