More than 50 years after John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 bed-in, protesting against war, Ono finally gets her love-in. David Sheff’s biography Yoko, published last week, seeks to put the record straight about her stellar achievements as an internationally renowned conceptual artist.

In recent years there have been retrospectives, including one at London’s Tate Modern. Kevin Macdonald’s docufilm, One To One: John And Yoko, is released in the UK next month. Ono, 92, is seeing reputational rehabilitation on a global scale, and all a long time coming.

Still, is the great mellowing towards Ono starting to obscure the truth of what went before? For decades, Ono was the ultimate rock’n’roll misogynist dartboard, blamed for breaking up the Beatles by perma-fuming Fab Four “stans”, for dragging Lennon away from his true calling and ruining popular culture for ever. Thus, Yoko became useful shorthand for the romantic partner who overstays their welcome or overplays their hand in the recording studio or on the tour bus. After her husband was shot dead in front of her (outside their New York residence, the Dakota building, in 1980, by Mark Chapman), it was notable how none of the public........

© The Guardian