All Dressed Up: The Sixties and Counterculture by Jonathon Green Pimlico pounds 12.50

WHEN Bill and Kris Brittian took over the First Christian Church in Auburn, outside Seattle, there were just 14 regular members of the congregation, all of them the wrong side of 50. So they made a few changes.

On 17 August 1979, Monty Python's Life of Brian was released in the US. The satirical film told the story of a man (Graham Chapman), born in the stable next door to Jesus, who lives 33 unremarkable years before being mistaken for a messiah and sentenced to "cwucifixion" by the Roman governor (Michael Palin). John Cleese played a pedantic Roman centurion and a pedantic Judean terrorist leader; director Terry Jones was Brian's screeching mother; Eric Idle leapt around saying "only joking" a lot.

Why do monsoons seem to generate great art and poetry? Jeremy Atiyah finds out in Bangladesh

A NINA SIMONE concert is more like a prayer meeting than a musical event, a religious experience in which the audience declared its devotion and projected its emotions on to a performer they treated like a deity, a people's princess. By the end of a long evening, the audience - young, middle-aged, old, men and women (and particularly the women) - were her devout acolytes, chanting her phrases and singing her praises, celebrating every brief sign. She had become Queen Nina, a sculpture with an inscrutable smile.

Nina Simone Meltdown/Royal Festival Hall London

THE HANDWRITTEN lyrics to one of The Beatles' most famous songs are expected to fetch more than pounds 60,000 when they are sold at auction later this year. The original words to "I Am The Walrus", which were written by John Lennon in black ink on a simple sheet of A4 paper, are slightly different from the final version.

"COLIN MANLEY was brilliant," Paul McCartney said during an interview on BBC Radio Merseyside in 1988. "He was the finest guitarist around Liverpool in the early 1960s and he could do all that Chet Atkins stuff with two fingers. A lot of the lads tried to play like that, but only Colin could do it really well."

PETER YORK ON ADS NUMBER 255: YELLOW PAGES

TWENTY-ONE YEARS ago an aircraft took off from Heathrow, made a deafening noise somewhere west of Ireland, and, after its passengers had sipped some Krug and supped on the finest beluga caviare, landed in New York two hours before it had taken off. It was an unprecedented event in the history of air travel.

LET ME tell you everything you know already about the Hare Krishna movement. Orange robes. Shaved heads. Tinkly finger-cymbals. Endless chanting in the rainy high streets of Britain's provincial towns. Hare Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Krishna. George Harrison's Tudor manor at Letchmore Heath. Disputes over noise with neighbours. Er, that's it.

Why use lawyers when a spot of GBH will do? Marion `Suge' Knight was not the first music biz manager to use direct methods, nor will he be the last.

FRANK SINATRA long credited "Something" to Lennon and McCartney - and amended George Harrison's lyric: "You stick around, Jack, it might show."

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