John Lennon and Yoko Ono at the Queen Elizabeth hotel in Montreal in 1969, where they held their bed-in to protest at the Vietnam war.
Photograph: Gerry Deitfer/AFP/Getty Images
Those of you scanning the print edition of this newspaper today might easily have flicked straight past page eight, a dozen paragraphs of simple type surrounded by a large white border with a simple sketch of a man, woman and child at the bottom.
A low-key corporate advertisement? No, Yoko Ono's personal plea for peace and love on the 26th anniversary of John Lennon's murder.
The text reflects partly on the former Beatle's death on December 8, 1980, when Mark Chapman shot him four times outside the entrance of his New York City apartment building.
Ms Ono muses:
"As the widow of one who was killed by an act of violence, I don't know if I am ready yet to forgive the one who pulled the trigger."
She also calls for the anniversary to be a day when people around the world, while remembering her late husband, also think of the victims of violence and injustice:
"Every year, let's make December 8 the day to ask for forgiveness from those who suffered the insufferable."
No one would doubt the sincerity of the words. But they beg another question: is John Lennon a symbol for peace in the modern world?
The vast majority of fans who will pack into pop and rock gigs this weekend weren't even born when he was alive, and while many modern musicians revere Lennon (witness Liam Gallagher's uncritical adulation), to some he is an irrelevance, even a nonentity.
Yes, the Beatles still sell millions of albums - Love, the remixed and remastered edition of some classic songs went straight into the UK album charts at number five this week - will this still be the case in 20 years from now?
Finally, while estimations of Lennon's talent have probably risen still higher since his death, the subsequent 26 years have not been so kind to his reputation as a human being.
Even if you don't believe the worst excesses alleged in Albert Goldman's highly critical 1988 biography, a more recent book by Lennon's first wife, Cynthia, painted a convincing picture of a deeply-flawed character, obsessively jealous, sometimes petulant and violent and eventually neglectful to her and their son, Julian.
And as some have pointed out, who was the real John Lennon: the author of a song describing a world without possessions, or the multimillionaire who had (depending which account you read) either an entire room or an entire apartment to house his collection of fur coats?
