It may look like a vast version of Pizza Hut from the outside, but it’s very user-friendly and a far cry from the old British Library ­ an intimidating place where I once saw a young woman reduced to tears by a bag-checker barking at her for taking other libraries’ books into the Reading Room. The new British Library has the air of a grown-up college library, or a rather grand literary club ­ with all the social aspects that that entails. Glances from heads buried in books indicate surreptitious people-watching in progress, while notes left on absented desks suggest romantic trysts. Rumours that circulated in the old Reading Room ­ of distinctly physical liaisons in the book stacks ­ have yet to surface. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see hands meeting under antiquarian folios in the photocopying department. There are unbridled passions at work here, even in the dry realms of academe. Janet Street-Porter is away.

A strange footnote to cultural history has emerged in the last week or two. Sir Paul McCartney has reversed the song-writing credits on some Beatles songs on his latest live album, so that they now read by Paul McCartney and John Lennon rather than Lennon/McCartney. “Hey Jude”, “Yesterday” and “Eleanor Rigby”, he wishes the world to know if it did not already, were all his own work. John can certainly share the credit, as that was always the arrangement; but Sir Paul now feels that the real writer should, after all these years, come first on certain seminal compositions, so that music fans know who was really responsible. Actually, on the first Beatles album the credits did read McCartney/Lennon But after that they were forever reversed. Sir Paul recounted last week in a statement to the press (yes, a statement to the press – do not underestimate the importance of these footnotes to cultural history) that he arrived late at a meeting with John and the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein shortly after that first album and they had already agreed to use Lennon/McCartney henceforth.An older, more worldly-wise McCartney would never have arrived late for such a meeting.

One can only speculate on the speed with which Lennon impressed upon Epstein the elegance of alphabetical order.The second episode that weighed heavily on McCartney occurred much more recently when he was in a bar and looked at the pianist’s sheet music “Hey Jude” was ascribed to John Lennon. Songwriting credits are indeed sometimes shortened for reasons of space; but the phrase “Don’t shoot me, I’m only the piano player” may well have been screamed in terror that night.I understand his irritation (though I wish he had been as irritated by the ridiculous omission of John’s “Strawberry Fields” from the 1 album, which brought the songs to a new generation). McCartney has genuine reasons for irritation in perceptions of the Beatles. The way Lennon is regarded as the avant-garde one and McCartney as a suburban, middle-of-the-road figure is unfair.

McCartney championed cutting-edge art in the Sixties and mixed in avant-garde circles, as artists such as Peter Blake will attest.But messing with the order of songwriting credits is like messing with the language The ear has got used to them. Sullivan and Gilbert does not sound right; nor does Hammerstein and Rodgers Nor, after all these years, does McCartney and Lennon. I’m not sure, either, that those who were interested ever made the mistakes of attribution that Sir Paul fears. In the case of the Beatles, fans tended to think, rightly, that whoever sang the song probably wrote it.