I Read the the News Today, Oh Boy

Book excerpt: 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 17, 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 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. Paul Howard has interviewed more than 100 people who knew Tara Browne, including his widow Nicki and his brother Garech, to piece together the extraordinary story of his life.