John Pearson

In the Year AD 80 the Colosseum opened with quite the longest and most nauseating organized mass orgy in history. It was a mammoth celebration on the grandest scale, a fitting inauguration for an arena built to epitomize all the majesty and power of the Roman Empire, a building which also held the seeds of that Empire's decay and destruction. As well as his vivid account of the erection of the Colosseum, Mr Pearson discusses the origins of death spectacles and their evolution into highly organized games intended to enhance imperial prestige and provide the populace with an effective substitute for politics and war. 'Butchered to make a Roman holiday', the victims of this lust for slaughter were slaves and criminals, the human surplus of their day, coached for an almost certain death. One chapter highlights the perverted death-wish of many early would-be martyrs and decisively establishes that there is no evidence for the death of a single Christian martyr in the Colosseum. The book concludes with a brief survey of the building's subsequent history; looted and despoiled yet still the embodiment of Rome's spirit and greatness, it became a sublime romantic ruin, now exposed by slum-clearance as a gigantic traffic island. Mr Pearson is acutely aware of the violence that was endemic in Roman society, and in his shrewd analysis he draws disturbing parallels with the twentieth-century situation.

It is now over fifty years since the premiere of Dr No, the very first Bond film, with Sean Connery introducing 007 as the glamorous secret agent who would become the single most profitable movie character in the history of cinema. But James Bond was invented by one man, Ian Fleming, a wartime intelligence officer and Sunday Times newspaper man who lived to see only the very beginning of the Bond cult. Pearson, who worked with Fleming at the Sunday Times, based this biography on his own memories of Fleming, on Fleming’s private papers, and on a series of interviews with an extraordinary collection of Fleming’s contemporaries – family, friends, enemies, teachers, colleagues, mistresses, and former spies from around the world. First published in 1966, John Pearson's famous biography remains the definitive account of how only Ian Fleming could have dreamed up James Bond, for he led a life as colourful as anything in his fiction, which in turn became a covert autobiography. Charming, debonair and a ruthless womaniser, globetrotting from wartime Algiers to beachside Jamaica, Fleming was as elusive and opaque as his imaginary creation. In his new introduction to this edition, Pearson examines the extent to which Fleming's character informs the movie portrayals of Bond, from Sean Connery through to Daniel Craig, and how Bond himself has achieved immortality beyond Fleming's wildest dreams.

Growing up in the supreme moral rigour of Queen Victoria’s court, young Bertie was always going to find it hard to live up to his parents’ expectation. He was far from a brilliant student, and though charming, his carnal inclinations were widely rumoured to have sped up his Father’s decline, with Prince Albert dying a mere two weeks after Bertie spent three nights with an actress who had been smuggled into his military camp. He waited almost sixty years to ascend the throne but was nonetheless able to reconfigure the public image of the monarch, taking the splendour beyond the palace gates and living lavishly in wider society, rapidly becoming one of the most popular monarchs in the history of the crown. First published in 1975, these chapters in the life of Edward the Rake are dealt with frankly and light-heartedly. It is the story of a man who enjoyed himself and his indelicate advantages to the full, it is a penetrating and yet not unsympathetic portrait of the monarch and of the discreetly swinging social world that he created around him.

A fascinating look at the British Royal Family as they were perceived in the 1980s. In recent times the British monarchy has become an 'ultimate family' of international superstars, their adventures and personalities transmitted round the globe like episodes in the world's most popular soap opera. The process began with Queen Mary's transformation of the family into symbols of middle-class morality, but accelerated greatly with the televising of Queen Elizabeth II's Coronation and the euphoric sense of a 'new Elizabethan age' about to begin in gloomy post-war Britain. Prince Charles's Investiture in 1969 was the springboard of a major PR campaign to provide royalty with a human face and helped shape the contemporary image of the royal family as both 'special' and 'ordinary'. First published in 1986, this work came at a time of heightened interest in the royals as it followed the establishment of Lady Diana as the 'ultimate dream princess', Diana, and arrived in the wake of Prince Andrew's wedding. John Pearson’s fascinating book defines the Royal Family for the 1980s.

Ever since the Kray twins invited John Pearson to write their 'official' biography more than forty years ago, he has been obsessed with them.