Biggles: The Authorized Biography (Bloomsbury Reader)

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 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 unraveled 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.