Fourth of July is this coming weekend and Lawrence (Shaver) Ketch would like to be done with first crop hay. Not only is there a family picnic, but also the Five on the Fourth Road Race that he uses to measure progress year to year. The picnic goes as planned, but he’s a scratch at the race. Someone else bales him out on the hay. Why? Who is the stranger on his porch when he and his wife, Connie, return home after the fireworks? Shaver’s brother, JJ, and good friend, Steve (Gulp) Hardy, ha...

Ever since the Kray twins invited John Pearson to write their 'official' biography more than forty years ago, he has been obsessed with them. After they were jailed in 1969 for thirty years for murder, Pearson's biography The Profession of Violence enjoyed a cult following among the young and was said to be the most popular book in H.M.'s prisons, after the Bible.Ron died in 1995. Reg followed him five years later, and both of their funerals drew crowds on a scale unknown ...

The classic, bestselling account of the infamous Kray twins, now a major film, LEGEND, starring Tom Hardy.Reggie and Ronald Kray ruled London's gangland during the 1960s with a ruthlessness and viciousness that shocks even now. Building an empire of organised crime such as nobody has done before or since, the brothers swindled, intimidated, terrorised, extorted and brutally murdered. John Pearson explores the strange relationship that bound the twins together, and ...

Chance discoveries and world-leading research transformed Australia's agriculture. They made farming possible in marginal areas and more sustainable everywhere. How did it happen and who made it happen?The story starts with earliest discoveries, such as Amos Howard's finding subterranean clover in 1889, through the golden era of research, the spread of annual legumes and the breeding of a new crop, grain lupin, to creating new wine-growing regions such as Margaret River, to the pre...

Inspired by the most infamous incident involving the Getty family - now a major film directed by Ridley Scott, starring Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Williams and Oscar****® Nominee Christopher PlummerOil tycoon J. Paul Getty created the greatest fortune in America - and came close to destroying his own family in the process. Of his four sons who reached manhood, only one survived relatively unscathed. One killed himself, one became a drug-addicted reclu...

From the author of All the Money in the World, now a major motion picture, comes a history of Lady Diana's family, the Spencers, a dynasty that rose from sheep farmers to the ranks of upper aristocracy and, finally, royalty.When Lady Diana Spencer married the Prince of Wales in 1981, very little attention was given to her feudal family. The once powerful Spencer dynasty was in disarray and seemed to have outlived its usefulness. In the years following Dian...

From the author of All the Money in the World and The Profession of Violence comes the definitive biography of James Bond's creator, Ian Fleming.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 office...

The first major biography of Winston Churchill to focus on his inner life and psychology'An extraordinary biography...Pearson...has a sensitive pen, matching the wit of his subject, and shows perceptive intuition towards the delicate relationships between the members of the Churchill family and their assorted spouses and lovers.' International Journal on World PeaceHe was a lion of a man who helped shape the course of this century ...

First published in 1978 Façades details the lives of three of the twentieth century's most intriguing literary figures: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell. Aristocrats emanating from a privileged but loveless youth, they moulded the scene of the English avant-garde throughout the 1920s and in Cyril Connolly's words, 'had they not been there a whole area of life would have been missing.' Picking up protégés and starting feuds with equal alacrity they were never far from controve...

John Pearson knows more about the Krays than anyone alive. Legend, starring Tom Hardy, was based on his book The Profession of Violence and it was Pearson who exposed the Boothby connection in 1994. In 1967 the twins asked Pearson to write their biography. He remained a confidant of the family and the brothers throughout their trial and prison years.Now Pearson revisits the twins' criminal past and lays bare the truth behind the legend. Drawing upon a mass of firs...

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 Elizabe...

From the author of All the Money in the World, now a major motion picture directed by Ridley Scott, comes the fictional biography of the mystical and fearless ace, James Biggles Worth.For over fifty years, James Biggles Worth, D.S.O., D.F.C., M.C. has flown the skies in everything from Sop with Camels to the earliest jets, he emerged with glory from devilish scrapes all over the world.Yet until now Biggles has often been seen as a storybook caricature. A dashed fin...