In 1964, in Australia's remote outback, on the dazzling saltpan of Lake Eyre, Donald Campbell set out to drive his Bluebird car at over 400 miles an hour - faster than any man in history. Things went wrong from the start: unseasonal rains, a sodden lake bed in which every high-speed run slewed dangerously, money running short...even an Aboriginal curse. WIth death shimmering on the horizon before him, the lonely Campbell tried to hold his nerve until he broke the record. Campbell would los...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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 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...

Britain's foremost writer on crime turns to the disappearance of Lord Lucan. The basis of the upcoming ITV drama, Lucan, starring Rory Kinnear and Christopher EcclestonFor over thirty years, John Pearson has provided us with literary exposures of some of the most enigmatic people and underground organisations of our modern world. The Gamblers follows the fortunes of five men at the centre of the ultra-fashionable Clermont Set: the Clermont Club's eccentric...

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...

_____________________________At Ronnie Kray's funeral, London crime expert John Pearson saw a man he didn't recognise - but who all the notorious criminals present deferred to.This is the remarkable true story of that man: 'the Englishman'.Investigations revealed that the Englishman was never mentioned in any of the previous books on organised crime, not because he wasn't involved, but because everyone was too scared...

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...

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...

First published in 1973, Arena discusses the Year AD 80, when 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 o...