'Blame It On The Beatles ... And Bill Shankly' by John Winter, who was a pupil at Liverpool College in the late fifties and early sixties, tells the story of the rise to national, and then international, fame of The Beatles and Liverpool FC in the nineteen sixties. It was an amazing time to be young and living in Liverpool, and the events of that magical decade are seen through the eyes of a group of fictional Liverpool teenagers, one of whom tells the story. A school dance which takes place early in the book is set in what ex-pupils are likely to recognise as The Sutton Timmis Hall!

Those who were lucky enough to be around in the sixties will be aware that Jurgen Klopp has created the same feeling in the club and the city that the great Bill Shankly achieved when he arrived at Anfield and turned an underperforming football club around. It won't be easy, but let us hope that the success of Bill Shankly - and Bob Paisley who followed him as manager - can be repeated in the years to come. Such achievements are good for the reputation of our great city.

The book, which was first published in late 2018, is available from retailers such as Amazon, Waterstones and Hive, as well as from http://www.beatlesbookstore.com/.

For further details about the book, if interested, you can go to the website http://blameitonthebeatles.com

On the website https://www.amazon.co.uk you can also find details of John Winter's first book, which he wrote after retiring from his career as a physician in 2014. 'Aiming High - Overland to The Himalayas 1971' is an account of an overland drive from Liverpool to India, along what was then The Hippy Trail, passing through exotic and then relatively unknown places such as Afghanistan. Having just qualified as a doctor, John had been invited to join an expedition to attempt the unclimbed West Ridge of a 21,000 ft Himalayan peak called Indrasan. The book is unusual in that he had never previously done any climbing. He had not even been to the summit of Snowdon. Having undergone a crash course in rock and snow techniques, he climbed with the rest of the team. But the book is very much a description of extreme Himalayan mountaineering as seen from the perspective of a non-climber. The first edition is now out of print, but a second edition is still available as an e-book on Amazon Kindle.