Pontius Pilate

The foil to Jesus, the defiant antihero of the Easter story, mocking, skeptical Pilate is a historical figure who haunts our imagination. For some he is a saint, for others the embodiment of human weakness, an archetypal politician willing to sacrifice one man for the sake of stability. In this dazzlingly conceived biography, a finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize, Ann Wroe brings man and myth to life. Working from classical sources, she plunges us into the world of biblical Judaea under the reign of the erratic and licentious emperor Tiberius and lets us see the trial of Jesus, in all its confusion, from the point of view of his executioner.

The foil to Jesus, the defiant antihero of the Easter story, mocking, skeptical Pilate is a historical figure who haunts our imagination. For some he is a saint, for others the embodiment of human weakness, an archetypal politician willing to sacrifice one man for the sake of stability. In this dazzlingly conceived biography, a finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize, Ann Wroe brings man and myth to life. Working from classical sources, she plunges us into the world of biblical Judaea under the reign of the erratic and licentious emperor Tiberius and lets us see the trial of Jesus, in all its confusion, from the point of view of his executioner.

The New York Times Book Review - Reynolds Price

. . . an original kind of speculative biography. It is a substantial tribute to her Oxford training as a historian, her breadth of reading and her canny but careful imagination to report that she has achieved much more than might have been expected...illuminating

Ann Wroe wrote her first book at the age of seven. She received her doctorate in history from Oxford University, and then joined the BBC World Service to cover the last years of communism in Europe. Since 1992 she has been the editor of the American section of The Economist; before that she was its literary editor. Her books include Lives, Lies and the Iran-Contra Affair and A Fool and His Money, an account of a scandal in a French village during the Hundred Years' War. She lives in London with her husband and three sons.