Fall: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain's Most Notorious Media Baron

"That was completely my experience as well. I thought, ‘Robert Maxwell: why? It’s sad, it’s unpleasant, it was a long time ago.’ And I think I can say all of us judges were just gripped. It was the absolute readability of the book. I think there’s been around a dozen Maxwell biographies—someone counted them all up—and it shows you can still get new things out of an old subject. It’s all about the skill of the writing. John Preston is an immensely experienced journalist, an immensely experienced nonfiction writer. He wrote the Jeremy Thorpe book, A Very English Scandal . He’s also a novelist. All those disciplines, I think, give him something. As a novelist, he knows a good character when he sees one—this amazing, larger-than-life, awful person. As a journalist, he knows you don’t make things up, you go to the sources. Amazingly, he’s managed to speak to three of the Maxwell children, as well as Maxwell’s surviving sister. I don’t think anyone has managed that before. He also gets an interview with Rupert Murdoch, which hasn’t been done before on the subject of Maxwell. Then, as a nonfiction writer, he has the ability to tell this extraordinary story about a man who is just making things up as he goes along, a man who makes himself to the moment, this self-created monster. Maxwell was born into an impoverished Czechoslovakian Jewish family on the eve of Nazism. It was very traumatic; he lost his family in the Holocaust . Preston never skates over that, not at all, but looks at what Maxwell did with that. For a long time, for instance, he denied that he was Jewish. And yet, he ended up being buried on the Mount of Olives because he put so much money into Israel. The book is a bit like the Sackler family book in that you wonder, ‘How did we let this happen?’ When Maxwell fell off his boat and died, Margaret Thatcher and George Bush Sr telephoned with condolences. Then, within 10 months, we realize that he’s a billion pounds in debt and has stolen £350 million from the Daily Mirror pensioners. What is the nature of charisma? How is he so charismatic and so awful? We all said, ‘Oh, yes, he’s a bit of buffoon, but you’ve got to love him really’. He’s in that great tradition of old English eccentrics, all the more interesting because he came from Czechoslovakia. Also, because he fell off his boat, there’s always been a mystery about whether he jumped or fell or was pushed or assassinated. His boat was called the Lady Ghislaine, after his daughter. Now, of course, we’ve got the Ghislaine Maxwell trial coming up at the end of November. There’s a sense in which this story rumbles on and on because it’s clear that she had the most shocking upbringing. He was violent, he was disgusting. We have this extraordinary coda of his youngest and most adored daughter being involved in these very unsavoury things. Yes, it was extraordinary, the power of the unions to make a difference. The book does have wonderful nostalgia. There are great stories in it. I remember the Mirror used to have a ‘spot the ball’ competition. If you got it right, you got you could win a million pounds. But Maxwell rigged it all to make sure that nobody ever got more than £25! Preston does a very good job of recalling that time, after Maxwell comes out of World War II. He’s got an eye for that postwar, the 60s, 70s, 80s milieu. We don’t yet have social media and there’s still an enormous space in which you can make yourself into whoever you want to be. There’s a Carry On element to it as well. At that point, we still liked scoundrels and rotters and Maxwell stepped forward and took up that space. He called his house Maxwell House, which is so funny. Then, standing on top of it, he peed on passers-by walking down below. It’s shockingly uninhibited. I think this book really is a model of what can be done with an old subject. It does something. It’s great."