Despite his youth, Brian was a deeply paternal character who by rights should have married and raised a family. All those hitherto ungratifiable impulses to be provident and protective—and indulgent—he now poured into managing the Beatles, treating them not as his clients but as his children. This approach worked most powerfully on the one who, behind a carapace of toughness and independence, had longed for such a presence in his life since his Uncle George’s death six years earlier.
