Stones

Philip Norman was born in London and brought up on the Isle of Wight. He joined the Sunday Times at the age of twenty-two, soon gaining a reputation as Atticus columnist and for his profiles of figures as diverse as Elizabeth Taylor, P. G. Wodehouse and Colonel Gaddafi. In 1981 he published SHOUT!, a ground-breaking biography of the Beatles, a bestseller in both Britain and the US. He has also written the definitive lives of Sir Elton John and Buddy Holly and his journalism has been published in three collections. He is married with a daughter and lives in London.

'The Stones are lucky to have found a biographer of Philip Norman's class'Pete Townshend'An elegiac book, a record of evanescence as much as of durability, and it reminds us of an epoch that threw up lions with no more energy than it threw out losers'The Times‘Wonderfully unravels the social history of that extraordinary time, and does not pull any punches’Daily Telegraph‘Details their amazing career and lifestyle…After reading this account one cannot help but marvel that they have survived’Daily Express‘Read it as a cautionary tale of success becoming excess…read it through a haze of nostalgia that will send you back to the early indifferently produced LPs – and the singles whose power derives from the simplest riffs and the most indelible memories of the Sixties. But read it’John Walsh in Books and Bookmen