It’s 11 years since Robert Maxwell went for his last swim The occasion will not go unmarked. Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon’s Robert Maxwell: Israel’s Superspy, due in December from Carroll & Graf, provides evidence for the case that the Bouncing Czech was killed by Mossad “because he was threatening to expose his knowledge of Israeli secrets unless he received Israeli help in propping up his failing businesses”. Thomas and Dillon allege that the agents boarded the yacht under cover of darkness, injected the tycoon with a nerve gas, and lowered the body into the sea. The Whitbread-winning author can now add the Eleanor Farjeon Award to his mantelpiece.
The prize, in honour of the woman whose greatest claim to fame is probably “Morning has broken”, recognises Pullman’s “outstanding contribution to children’s literature”.¿ Until now, Lyons’ Corner Houses were famous for their so-called Nippies and their ability to provide a quick cuppa and a penny bun. But science writer Georgina Ferry is working on a book which details another claim to fame. John Simmons was, in the 1930s, the man responsible for the hand-checking of all Lyons bills. He decided to build a machine to automate the millions of transactions and process them quickly. A Computer Called Leo chronicles Simmons’s amazing mission, which briefly put Britain at the forefront of global business.. THE DARK, intense eyes of the young Elizabeth Jane Howard gaze out from the front cover of her memoir, Slipstream (Macmillan,£20).
Turn the book over and on the back are the same eyes, but 60 years on, in a face lined with experience of life. This is the image that readers of her novel sequence, the Cazalet Chronicles, will recognise. The raving beauty with the disturbing gaze is the image her lovers would remember – if any were still alive. Of her three marriages, the first was to Peter Scott, the naturalist and son of Captain Scott, and the third to Kingsley Amis But Howard was not a conscious scalp-hunter. She moved in literary circles because, she explains, she liked the company of her colleagues, as musicians like being with other musicians. It was some time before she realised she was beautiful, for as a child she had been made to feel plain and clumsy. She wishes now she had enjoyed that beauty more, instead of wanting to be loved for other qualities She still has a distinctive presence.
She walks with a stick, as a result of arthritis, but it’s a splendid ebony one. She has no intention, at the age of nearly 80, of becoming invisible.The quest for love remained a constant. She says: “I thought that if I could get love right, everything else would follow naturally.” The reason she couldn’t get it right had to do with her parents. Her mother, a former dancer with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, followed the old-fashioned parental practice of undermining a child’s self-esteem, and her daughter was made aware that she was not good-looking, clever, or good at anything. Her handsome father was charming, gregarious and kind – until around the time of her 15th birthday, when he remarked how fast she was growing up and sexually assaulted her. She struggled free and, after several other assaults, made sure she was never alone with him.”My father had a terrible time in the first war,” she recalls. “He was 17 when he joined up and suffered four years of atrocious sights and sounds.