John Preston - FALL - The Mystery of Robert Maxwell Softback - 322 pages

In excellent condition.

There are many ways to fall, and Preston deals mainly with two: the fall from grace as a billionaire transatlantic publisher, former Labour MP and friend – perhaps “associate” is more accurate – of some of the world’s most powerful people; and the fall from the stern of the Lady Ghislaine, which left him floating naked and dead off the Canary Islands.

The book’s subtitle is The Mystery of Robert Maxwell, and there are mysteries aplenty. Born in 1923 as Jan – or was it Ludvik? – Hoch into a large Jewish family in the village of Solotvino, in what was then Czechoslovakia, he left home at 16 to join the resistance to the Nazis. He walked 275 miles to Budapest, was captured, imprisoned as a spy, faced a possible death penalty but escaped after attacking his guard. But how much of that was true? A cousin remembered travelling with him to Budapest by train, and Maxwell told various versions of his escape, including having his handcuffs removed by a “Gypsy lady” while he hid under a bridge. Had she, wonders Preston, “crept onstage… from some colourful corner of his imagination?”

Pick up is in Devonport

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