Christmas Books: Music - 15 YEARS OF CHARLIE ; Stuck for Ideas? in the First of Our Christmas Specials, We Recommend Books for Children as Well as for Lovers of Music and Military History, Football and Humour. Next Week: Art, Photography, Film, Crime Novels and Celebrity Biographies

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The year's most meticulously researched and widely discussed music book was The Colonel (Aurum pounds 19.99) in which Alanna Nash tells "The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley". Parker wasn't actually a colonel: indeed he was discharged from the US army for being a psychopath. And until he was 20 he wasn't Tom Parker either. Born Andreas van Kujik, he was a carnival huckster who, Nash contends, fled his native Holland for the US because he had bludgeoned a woman to death. Equal parts Machiavelli and Svengali, and a con-artist through and through, he discovered the ultimate carnival attraction gyrating its pelvis at county fairs in 1955. Elvis signed a …