Handsomely bound in half black calf and black cloth, embellished with a brown leather inlay and gilt guitar motif to the upper cover and gilt facsimile signature to lower cover, five raised bands, gilt-stamped spine, brown leather spine label, all edges gilt, ribbon bookmark, 4 separate music scores as endpapers, 2 tipped-in sepia toned childhood portraits with tissue guards as frontispiece and endpiece, 17 text engravings, 48 photo plates + large 4 panel fold-out plate, 120 colour facsimile pages containing 83 of George's song lyrics. These special Publisher's Copies include an open edition copy of I ME MINE presented in a beautiful slipcase with an exclusive 6" x 4" photographic print.

This was the central contradiction that made Harrison, the composer of classics like “ Here Comes the Sun,” and “ Taxman,” a fascinating figure, both as a Beatle and after the band broke up, as Norman explores in his book “George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle. One of George’s closest friends, Sir Michael Palin, took time off from globetrotting to express bemusement over that “quiet one” moniker, “because as far as I remember, he never stopped talking”.It does have mistakes and reads more as a collection of fairly familiar anecdotes or tropes rather than an attempt to revisit or re-examine the stories and received wisdom. Among Harrison biographers, Simon Leng views the song as a "pivotal composition" in the artist's career, [25] while Dale Allison considers it to be "a crucial song for interpreting George's religiosity".

My previous books have taught me there’s such a thing as biographer’s luck and, latterly, even to trust to it. According to Norman, a firecracker exploded during a gig in Memphis, and the Fab Four immediately “looked around to see which of them had been shot”. A subversive streak saw him mortgage his country pile to provide last-minute finance to the imperilled production of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. His catalogue of wonderful songs that were sidelined during his time in The Beatles by John and Paul’s command was a travesty.

I guess I just had one of those moments where I finally got to meet another hero up close and personal, and found out they're as flawed and confused as the rest of us. At that point, almost everything I knew about George had gone into my 1981 Beatles biography, Shout!