Richard Pares was born on 25 Aug 1902 in Colchester, England, and educated at Winchester and Balliol College, Oxford. After working for a year as an Assistant Lecturer at University College London, Pares undertook a year of research in the United States and the West Indies, financed by a Laura Spelman Rockefeller memorial studentship (1928). In 1929, he was appointed as a Lecturer at New College, Oxford (1929-1940) and from 1938-1939 he was Junior Proctor. During World War II, Pares served with distinction as an administrative-class civil servant on the Board of Trade (1940-1945); he was appointed CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1945. He was joint editor of the English Historical Review (1939-1958), Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh (1945-1954), and Ford's Lecturer in English History at the University of Oxford (1951-1952). He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1948. Pares died in Oxford on 3 May 1958. Compiled with reference to the Dictionary of National Biography.

In the 1940s-1950s, Pares transcribed excerpts from the 18th century letter books of the Lascelles, a Yorkshire family who owned plantations in Barbados from the 17th century. Wilkinson & Gaviller, the successors to the Lascelles, kept the original letter books in London, and eventually all but one were destroyed when London was bombed in Dec 1940. Pares' transcripts became all that remained of most of the letter books. In 2004, Dr Clare Taylor, a historian specialising in colonial history and the history of the West Indies, retranscribed Pares' fading pencil notes into typed copies.