Awards

• Short-listed for Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 1999
• Short-listed for WH Smith Annual Literary Award 2000
• Short-listed for WH Smith Literary Prize 2000
• Shortlisted for Samuel Johnson Prize 1999.
• Shortlisted for Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 1999.
• Shortlisted for W H Smith Annual Literary Award 2000.
• Shortlisted for WH Smith Annual Literary Award 2000.
• Shortlisted for WH Smith Literary Prize 2000.

Overview

Anne Wroe's extraordinary and compelling biography of a very elusive figure. Although very little is known for certain about Pontius Pilate, the man who crucified Christ, this has not stopped writers in every age from imagining his life. In this extraordinary book, Ann Wroe recounts the lives of all our Pilates; among them the glittering medieval tyrant, devoted to gambling and getting around the law, and the wriggling modern pragmatist, whose dilemma over Jesus has been described by Tony Blair as 'a timeless parable of political life'. This is also the story of the man Pilate might have been; and the man who mirrors us. Ann Wroe shows how, in his struggles with fate and free will, Pilate's story has also become the story of ourselves.

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9780099287933

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Reviews

The sheer skill of the writing... the touch of a master-novelist... Few have ever explored so imaginatively, or with such passionate attention to detail. - Sunday Telegraph <p> Extraordinary and compelling. - Sunday Telegraph <p> Ann Wroe's knowledge of the past 2,000 years is encyclopaedic--She manages to keep Pilate living and breathing in the text, and occasionally kicking and screaming. - Independent on Sunday

The subtitle of Wroe's splendid biography of Pontius Pilate reveals a profound truth and is a meticulous and eloquent description of the way Pilate has been perceived in history, literature and legend during the last 2000 years. For it has indeed been an 'invention'. The well-meaning Pilate of the Gospels bears little relation to the brutal portrait given by Philo of Alexandria, an older contemporary of Jesus Christ. Later tales become even more fanciful, demonstrating a blithe disregard for facts but an intense interest in the meaning of Jesus's trial and condemnation by the Roman governor of Judea. In the course of this account of a developing fantasy, the reader discovers in a new way that evil and good are often deeply and mysteriously complementary; that religion has little to do with history as we understand it today; and that Christianity's success as a world faith is due to the mythos of Jesus's death and resurrection depicting a timeless truth, which each generation has been able to apply to its own circumstances. Review by KAREN ARMSTRONG Editor's note: Karen Armstrong is the author of A History of God. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Ann Wroe is the Obituaries editor of The Economist, and has written its weekly obituary for almost two decades. She is the author of eight previous works of non-fiction, including biographies of Pontius Pilate (shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Award and the W.H. Smith Award), Perkin Warbeck, Shelley, Orpheus (winner of the Criticos Prize) and St Francis. She lives in Brighton and London.

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