'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 realize 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 math and decided that readers may need some biography after all.
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