The Beatles: All These Years by Mark Lewisohn. Tune In - What do you think? (Spoilers alert!) | Page 15 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

meaigs said
I know historian isn’t a protected term like engineer, but his background is in research and journalism. I’m not sure he has any education in modern historical methods.

I’ve also heard him say on a podcast that he can’t afford assistants, but also doesn’t want to use them.

  

I think your concerns are valid. I haven't seen any reference to it in this thread but there has been a podcast "Another Kind of Mind" with an 11 part series critiquing "Tune In" basically claiming that Lewisohn has a pro John anti Paul bias and he deliberately uses his sources to do this. Now whatever you think of this series, I think we should always welcome critiques and see if they make any substantive points and in this case I think they do. Serene Sargent has a lot of these quotes here: https://therealtamishow.com/20.....e-history/ I sourced them from here, I'd be interested if anyone can verify them

Relevant to meaigs point about Lewisohn not being a Historian, one of the criticisms is Lewisohn's use of quotes. Luckily Lewisohn does source his quotes. Quotes should always exactly reproduce their source, Lewisohn regularly fails to do this. Some are pretty inconsequential like correcting spelling errors without using [sic], most of us wouldn't really care about that, but trained Historians likely would object to this. But then he also removes clauses without indicating it with ellipses "..." for instance:

Tune In (Chapter 22, note 9, p511 (short version) :
“Brian Kelly was fraught with anxiety over it. It was only a short episode and a bit of a shambles.”

Serene Sargent sources this Wooler quote as:
“Brian Kelly was fraught with anxiety over it, but the audience liked it. It was a bit of a shambles really, so I lowered the curtain on the proceedings.”

and 

Tune in Chapter 10 note 10 p211

“'I was in a sort of blind rage for two years, he said 'I was either drunk or fighting. There was something the matter with me.'” 

The quote sourced by Serene Sargent is:

“I was in a sort of blind rage for two years. 'I was either drunk or fighting. It had been the same with other girlfriends I’d had. There was something the matter with me.” 

Lewisohn has a pattern of doing this a trained Historian would never do so and in each case it does change the emphasis of each quote. But Lewisohn also has much worse cases than this where he mashes together quotes from different sources to create truly misleading quote:

"However, John remembered Paul’s attitude to Brian being very different. John was always emphatic that Paul didn’t want Brian as the Beatles’ manager and presented obstacles to destabilize him, to make his job difficult … like turning up late for meetings. “Three of us chose Epstein. Paul used to sulk and God knows what … [Paul] wasn’t that keen [on Brian]—he’s more conservative, the way he approaches things. He even says that: it’s nothing he denies.”"

Chapter 22 note 72 page 532

So Serene Sargent sources this from the Jann Wenner interview in 1970 when John is talking about Alan Klein:

JOHN: “It’s John, George and Ringo as individuals. We’re not even communicating with or making plans about Paul, we’re just reacting to everything he does. It’s a simple fact that he can’t have his own way so he’s causing chaos. I don’t care what you think of Klein—call Klein something else. Call him Epstein for now—and just consider the fact that three of us chose Epstein. Paul was the same with Brian in the beginning, if you must know. He used to sulk and God knows what. Wouldn’t turn up for the dates or the bookings.”

So the above quote “Three of us chose Epstein." is completely misleading. The other bit five years later John is answering a question about Brian presenting them nicely in their suits rather than Paul objecting to him as their manager, it might be possible to wrangle that meaning from the original quote ( I wouldn't), but the quote taken as a whole is entirely bogus. The sources Lewisohn's mangled quote comes from do not support his contention that "John was always emphatic that Paul didn’t want Brian as the Beatles’ manager".

I recommend listening to the "Another Kind of Mind" series "Fine Tuning" if you want to here a long but well sourced critique of Lewisohn's bias. 

Finally, Beatles writing is generally done for popular publication, it is not treated as an academic discipline, maybe in the future it will be, in the meantime I think it is probably best to be as wary of Lewisohn's credentials as you are of any other Beatles writer.