Book of the week: The Lyrics by Paul McCartney

McCartney’s charming delve into his back catalogue is the ‘closest to an autobiography we’ll get’

George Harrison and Paul McCartney on stage
George Harrison and Paul McCartney in New York, circa 1970
(Image credit: Art Zelin/Getty Images)

The accumulated horror of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries – in which an estimated 30,000 girls were incarcerated, some as late as the mid-1990s – is “hard to comprehend”, said Lucy Scholes in The Daily Telegraph. But in this astonishing novella, Claire Keegan “distils the years of suffering and torture” into a “tale of quiet but monumental devastation”.

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