How did Robert Maxwell fool most of the people most of the time?

‘Everyone’s heard of Ghislaine Maxwell,’ says the blurb for Power: The Maxwells, a podcast series launched last month. ‘But there’s a shadowy figure who hangs above her who you likely don’t know: her father, media tycoon Robert Maxwell.’ Blimey. I know that 30 years have passed since his soggy demise, and time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away, but it still comes as a shock to realise that such a preposterously outsize figure can be forgotten.

His tumble down the memory hole may explain why this is a book of two halves. When John Preston contacted me in 2018 with a Maxwellian query, he said: ‘I’m not actually doing a biography of Maxwell but focusing on the last 18 months when everything fell apart.’ Since then, he and his publishers have presumably done the maths and decided that readers may need some biography after all.

So the first half of Fall presents the once-familiar CV: the impoverished Jewish boy from Ruthenia who fled to England as a 17-year-old in 1940 and ended the war with a Military Cross; the Labour MP and businessman of whom a 1971 Department of Trade inquiry concluded that ‘he is not in our opinion a person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company’; the overbearing egomaniac who bought the Mirror titles in 1984 and soon showed how right the Department of Trade inspectors had been.