About the Author

Dr Chris Cook has been editing Pears' Cyclopaediasince 1977- the year of the Queen's silver jubilee, James Callaghan and The Clash. The world has changed since then, but Pears' remains the only book of its kind to be updated and revised annually. Dr Cook is helped in his yearly task of overseeing a varied team of expert contributors by his love of reference books, the compulsive reading of every kind of newspaper and his formidable academic record in creating historical works that have been translated into a dozen languages.