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, bringing to life the days when Fleet Street was the front-page equivalent of Dodge City and its pubs shuddered to the midnight roar of mighty rotary presses. The Mirror's daily quota of mischief, mayhem and madness attracted journalists from all over the globe. The columnist Cassandra called this convergence of talent 'Cudlipp's Circus' after its ringmaster, the great tabloid editor Hugh Cudlipp.

The author was night editor and deputy editor of the Daily Mirror, editor of the Sunday Mirror and a director of Mirror Group Newspapers. He describes the Mirror scene in its heyday from the baroque splendour of the chairman's office to its fabled pub, the Stab in the Back, and tells the inside story of the paper's great scoops, love affairs, vanities and vendettas.

But Cudlipp's Circus is much more than a classic tale of newspaper life appealing to journalists and the general reader everywhere. Written in the age of the Leveson inquiry following public revulsion over the News of the World's hacking of the mobile phone of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, it 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 since he plunged from his yacht Lady Ghislaine into the Atlantic waters on 5 November 1991 after committing the biggest fraud in British criminal history.

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.

Drawing on his extensive archive of documents, diaries and interviews with many of the great names in postwar journalism, the author has written an explosive memoir of extraordinary power, depth and perception.