Biggles: The Authorized Biography

by John Pearson

Overview

For over fifty years James Biggles Worth, D.S.O., D.F.C., M.C., has flown the skies. The mythical ace to end all flying aces, the fearless pilot of 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 fine chap, certainly, but not the extraordinary man he really was. Here, for the first time, is an insight into the 'real' man who made these adventures possible. In Biggles, his fictional biography, first published in 1978, John Pearson has unravelled the missing strands in Biggles' life; delving vigorously into subjects that were once taboo.

Why did Biggles never marry? What was the truth about his tragic first love? And what were Biggles' real regrets and frustrations as he tried to come to terms with a rapidly developing world in peacetime? The truth - so long hidden behind a stiff upper lip and an equally stiff pink gin in the Officers' Mess - is at last revealed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781448208005
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	06/20/2013
Pages:	396
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

John Pearson is the author of All the Money in the World (previously titled Painfully Rich), now a major motion picture directed by Ridley Scott film and starring Michelle Williams, Mark Wahlberg and Christopher Plumber (nominated for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor). He is also the author of The Profession of Violence, on which the Tom Hardy film Legend is based, and the follow-up, The Cult of Violence.

Born in Surrey, England in 1930, Pearson worked for Economist, The Times, and The Sunday Times, where he was the assistant of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. Pearson published the definitive biography of Fleming, The Life of Ian Fleming in 1966.

Pearson has since written many more successful works of both fiction and non-fiction. Biographies remain his specialty with accomplished studies of the Sitwells, Winston Churchill and the Royal Family.