Books by John Pearce

Delving into the Portable Antiquities Scheme archives to explore 50 finds from Britain's Roman history.

A bomb shatters the midnight silence, giving Mark and Kate only seconds to escape before their sailboat turns into a flaming hell. At the same time, a wrecking crew batters down the wall of their shop to steal a crucial tool the CIA needs to prevent a neo-Nazi takeover in Eastern Europe. Only a bump in the night kept their first overnight sail from being their last. Finding Pegasus is the story of an international criminal network marching in lockstep with the neo-Nazi autocrats of Eastern Europe; a paranoid, egocentric American Navy admiral; an old and bitter Silicon Valley billionaire; and a retired Hungarian spy who moved to Paris because the food was better. It should have been a perfect crime - witnesses dead, evidence spirited away, police not interested. But Eddie Grant helps Mark McGinley and Kate Hall follow the clues from Biscayne Bay to Paris, then on to the mountains of Hungary. There, the caves hide explosive secrets and the group must confront a new generation of storm troopers, this time supported by the Russian bear. The second escape is as close as the first. Finding Pegasus is the third in the Eddie Grant novel series. For information about review copies, go to PartTimeParisian.com

We have an education system, shaped over centuries, in which most children rarely fulfil their potential. Decades of governmental reforms; comparative studies; numerous inspectors' reports and a blame culture targeting teachers, certain categories of parents and their children have produced very little. Part One argues that the key reason for this incapability is the universally accepted concept of a 'curriculum' along with its correlating concepts of 'teaching' and 'organisation'. These form a powerful triad that is the foundation of a system which is structurally incapable of internal reform; unable to confront the complexities of modern life. Part Two describes and analyses a practical alternative. Rejecting the necessity for formal control, closeting in classes, and a painting by numbers curriculum, the concepts of 'curriculum' 'teaching' and 'organisation' are redefined, focusing upon how a powerful and liberating context in which educational activities may take place.

This study explores the insights into provincial Roman societies that can be gained from the archaeological evidence for burial practice, focused on Britain, drawing on wider work in the archaeology of death. It evaluates the distribution of burial evidence and the factors that condition it, including, it is argued, archaeologically invisible burial continuing from the Iron Age .It reviews the archaeological evidence for cremation rituals and explores how social status was expressed through burial, primarily in case studies from south-east England. Funerary ritual was a dynamic arena for asserting social status throughout the Roman period, taking forms that can be read as both 'traditional' and 'Roman'. The setting of burial is assessed to establish spatial relationships between living and dead in town and country and the distribution of funerary display across the landscape.