I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

Tara Browne was the golden boy around whom, for a short while, the entire extraordinary world of Sixties London seemed to revolve. Tara knew everybody and they all loved him, not for his money, as he feared, but because he, above them all, embodied the spirit of the age. I absolutely loved this book. It's a brilliant, vivid portrait of extraordinary timesMiranda Seymour, author of In My Father's House

After all these years, we at last know about the real life of the lucky man who made the grade. I found it fascinating to discover the true story of Tara Browne, a legend in a lyric.Hunter Davies, author of The Beatles: The Authorised Biography

I loved it! Howard's skilful evocation of an extraordinary turning point in cultural history is an absolute joy to read. The life of Tara Browne offers the perfect conduit into a psychedelic world populated by a legendary cast of characters that you simply couldn't make up. While it's clear that Howard undertook years of rigorous original research, his prose is always gripping and never laboured. The deep but slightly exasperated affection Howard feels for Browne injects pathos into this highly entertaining account of an extraordinary, chaotic, high-octane lifeEleanor Fitzsimons, author of Wilde’s Women: How Oscar Wilde Was Shaped by the Women He Knew

Tara Browne held the rare quality of romance. A figure of intense but passive glamour, he stood at the epicentre of the bohemian Anglo-Irish aristocracy and 1960s London at its most swinging, yet somehow gave the air of merely passing through life. In a wonderfully readable book, gleaming with detail, Paul Howard evokes the splendid vanished worlds that Browne inhabited and - no easy thing to do - makes us believe in his elusive, imperishable enchantmentLaura Thompson, author of Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters