In His Own Write & A Spaniard in the Works

Lunatic humour... it defies description. It owes something to Lear's nonsense books, but from there on in Lennon is on his own... Zany, offbeat, and illustrated by his grotesque spidery pen. It jolts the reader into gusts of laughter

Guardian

Very funny... beautifully designed

Times Literary Supplement

Fascinating.... It goes down like pure whimsy and then back-kicks like a sick mule.

Sunday Times

Irresistible...the drawings are marvellous

Sunday Telegraph

Very inventive... It's all in Lennon's favour that despite the adulation and soft soap, he has remained as tough, arrogant and uncompromising

Observer

John Lennon is a remarkably gifted writer... often hilarious, clever and funny

Melody Maker

The best books ever written by a pop star...there's no gainsaying the almost instinctive verbal dexterity of the book, enough, even at the time, to impress the TLS. And this is an age when the idea that pop stars were illiterate oiks was still very much entrenched. In fact, you could say that Lennon's crazed neologisms and language-mangling were, along with the almost insulting brevity of most of the pieces, deliberate engagements with such an idea...These books remain not only the best books ever written by a pop star - they remain the only ones needed, really...The drawings, too, are slapdash in just the right way, and are as inseparable from the text as Tenniel's are from Carroll's...I think that, as a kind of automatic writing, it does betray something of Lennon's internal state, however self-protectively offhand it looks at first sight

Nicholas Lezard, Guardian