The first biography written with Paul McCartney's approval and with access to family members and friends closest to him. Superbly evoking half a century of popular music and culture, Paul McCartney is the definitive life of a long-misunderstood genius. In this masterly biography, history's most successful songwriter, a man of seemingly effortless talent, beauty and charm, is revealed as a complex, insecure workaholic who still feels as great a need to prove himself in his seventies as when he was a teenager. We learn how his boyhood was blighted by the death of his mother, Mary - later the inspiration for 'Let It Be' - but redeemed by his remarkable father, Jim, a Liverpool cotton-salesman who was his only music-teacher and whose influence has permeated his career.