Cudlipp's Circus

Award-winning Australian author Peter Thompson evokes the now-vanished world he encountered on joining 'Cudlipp's Circus' at the Daily Mirror in 1966. But Cudlipp's Circus is much more than a classic tale of newspaper life appealing to journalists and the general reader. It also examines the acquisition of press power and its abuse through the lives of the four newspaper barons for whom the author worked: Cecil King, Hugh Cudlipp, Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch. His portrait of Maxwell as a corporate psychopath rampaging through the lives of others has never been bettered Thompson also charts the fall of Maxwell's favourite daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell, from her first appearance at the Daily Mirror in 1984 to the denouement thirty-eight years later in a New York courtroom, where she faced charges of the sexual abuse of under-aged women.