http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/mar/04/beatles-higher-education-liverpool-university

Their thirst for reinvention saw the elegantly quiffed Hamburg rockers become the mop-topped fab four, hippy harbingers of sexual liberation and, eventually, druggy psychedelic visionaries.

Forty years on, the Beatles and their songs are to be hauled into the halls of academia and dissected by postgraduate students at a Merseyside university.

The masters degree in The Beatles, Popular Music and Society is being billed by Liverpool Hope University as the first such course in the UK and "probably the world".

Among the topics covered on the course, which comprises four 12-week modules and a dissertation, are the postwar music industry, subcultures, and the importance of authenticity and locality.