Even for a rock star, even for ‘the most enigmatic, elusive and misunderstood of the Fab Four’, there seems something strangely paradoxical about spending your life searching for mind-expanding spiritual enlightenment and choosing to settle first in Esher, and then in Henley. Yet perhaps this is to misjudge the man and, indeed, the place he has made his home. For there is, Geoffrey Giuliano assures us, ‘nowhere else in the world like Henley.’ Breaking off our mantras, we wait, breathless for further illumination, some blinding insight into Henley’s place in the George Harrison cosmos. Then the next sentence: ‘Rod Stewart can often be seen shopping for tea biscuits at Waitrose.’ So this, perhaps, is it; the sight which may await those of us lucky enough to get as far along the spiritual highway.

If anyone should know it must be Giuliano. ‘Geoffrey Giuliano?’ asks the ‘quiet introspective, serious one’ as he treats us to an enigmatic back-cover smile, ‘that guy knows more about my life than I do.’ This certainly does not say much for the ‘serious one’s’ years in quest of self-knowledge. That a man who thinks Esher has a jail and that there is a place in Surrey called Epson should know his life better than himself must give George plenty to mull over until he next sees Rod in Waitrose.

The unfortunate title of one of the chapters, ‘Spot the Looney’, would be appropriate for the whole work: but which is it? Harrison, Giuliano , or any one of the number of ‘gurus’ each has chosen to follow? There is no doubt that whatever peculiar brand of eastern religion the