Published: 2 March 2021
Last updated: 5 March 2024
I INTERVIEWED ROBERT MAXWELL once, an experience not unlike being run over at speed with a steamroller. He was, as even his few friends would attest, a monstrous man, self-obsessed to the point of mania, deeply rude in behaviour, and fond of random public denigration of his staff.
And yet… as John Preston brings the old crook and liar magnificently to life in this sparkling biography, there was something extraordinary about Maxwell, the publishing tycoon who had not just climbed the greasy pole of success, but uprooted the pole and waved it, defiantly, in his detractors’ faces.
The only person whom Maxwell consistently failed to overcome was his great newspaper enemy, Rupert Murdoch, aka the Dirty Digger. Murdoch and a whole host of names, some well-known, some not, have spoken openly to Preston as he traces Maxwell’s trajectory from poor and unpromising beginnings in a nine-sibling Jewish family in Czechoslovakia, to the end of his life as owner of the Mirror Group of newspapers, sociopathic robber of its pension funds, and eventual burial on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives.
FULL STORY Mysterious monster (Jewish Chronicle)
Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell (Viking)
By John Preston
Photo: Robert Maxwell (Britannica)
