I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

He was the quintessential young fop, often seen wandering around the streets alone, eating caviar from a jar with his finger.'

Tara Browne was an extraordinary, glamorous figure for a brief moment. He grew up in aristocratic and bohemian luxury (his mother was a Guinness heiress); he walked out of school at eleven and never went back; he moved to Paris, where he knew the backstreet jazz bars like a local. At seventeen, he arrived in London, just as the Sixties were beginning to swing, and became part of a new elite cultural world. His friends included, of course, the Beatles and the Stones, as well as figures from film, fashion, photography and high society, and a few more dubious sorts on the fringes of the criminal and low-life worlds.

Tara Browne died tragically young, at twenty-one, and became a symbol of the loss of innocence of this era of optimism. His widow Nicki (he managed a marriage, a family and a separation in this short life) said, 'Tara was the 1960s. He was what it was supposed to be about, which was optimism and happiness and living without a thought for tomorrow. And he died before it all turned bad - which is why, I think, so many people like to remember him. Because remembering Tara is remembering the 1960s while we were all still so innocent.'

Bestselling Irish author Paul Howard has interviewed more than one hundred people who knew Tara Browne, including his widow Nicki and his brother Garech, to piece together the extraordinary story of his life and produce I Read the News Today, Oh Boy, the first full biography of a man like no other.