Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell
JOHN PRESTON
(VIKING, 352 PP, £18.99)
Tablet bookshop price £17.09 • tel 020 7799 4064
Among the welter of unanswered questions about the extraordinary life and death of Robert Maxwell, there remain two which still have some pertinence 30 years after the Lady Ghislaine cruised through the early light of the North Atlantic on the morning of 5 November 1991, towards the Canary Islands and a dawn that would bring a miasma of mystery, shock and, in due course, scandal.
The first is about the circumstances of the “fall” which provides this book’s enigmatic title. The second, which has only recently emerged, and is probably unanswerable anyway, is what we might call the “sins of the father” question, since the favourite daughter, for whom the yacht was named, has since achieved her own kind of international notoriety and inspired in a whole new generation on both sides of the Atlantic speculation about her remarkable family history.
