His scope is huge. He has a close knowledge of motorbikes, industrial chemicals, energy and the technologies of Silicon Valley, but his real love is flying, with other modes of transport – motorbikes and yachting – not so far behind. He has flown everything from gliders to a fully-spec’d Shuttle simulator. He was the first photo-journalist to write about the U-2 spy plane, and he has also covered the Blue Angels and the TOP GUN programme.

Unsurprisingly, several of his books are based around flying, including ‘Sierra Sierra’ which was a fiction about a real double world record-taking glider flight, and ‘A Full Accounting’ (written in collaboration with the Russian KGB defector Viktor Belenko) about the transfer of US pilots captured during the Vietnam War to Russia in order to garner military intelligence. The existence of MIAs was determinedly denied by both the US and Russian governments of the time, but ten minutes with ‘A Full Accounting’ will leave you in no doubt as to what happened.

John’s research for any book is meticulous and is used to breathtaking effect in, say, ‘A Full Accounting’ where we learn a great deal about Phantoms and MiGs, Vietnamese torture regimes, how MIAs were ‘disappeared’ and the pre-Glasnost Soviet career machine. Even for ‘Lulu’ which is about a wannabe actress who becomes a hooker and a murderess, which John could have concocted from his bath tub from what he already knew, a glass of Bordeaux in hand, he actually interviewed a whole mass of people about hotel and police procedures in different countries as well as personally checking each location in Paris, London, New York and California.