When the BBC conducted a poll to find the nation’s favourite lyric in 1999, the clear winner was John Lennon’s “Imagine”. Dominic Sandbrook can’t quote any of this 18-line celebration of the joys of dispossession because he can’t afford the copyright fees, and “anyway, the prospect of paying for another fur coat for Yoko Ono leaves me less than enthusiastic”. In fact, as he points out, the lyric is entirely negative, celebrating a world with no religion, no nations, no possessions. It has been chosen as a Desert Island Disc by celebrities as various as Neil Kinnock, Alison Steadman and Desmond Morris, all of whom Sandbrook charitably describes as highly intelligent. Lennon himself is seen by Sandbrook as a figure of “colossal symbolic