On this day: Robert Maxwell dies

Robert Maxwell, the media tycoon, was found dead in the Atlantic near Gran Canaria on 5 November 1991, apparently after falling from his yacht. His dramatic rise from a refugee who escaped Nazi persecution to a powerful publisher was shadowed by deception, and his death later became closely associated with the collapse of his business empire and revelations about its finances.

Born into a poor Jewish family in Czechoslovakia in 1923, Maxwell fled as Nazi and Hungarian forces threatened the region; most of his family were murdered in the Holocaust. He served in the British Army, received the Military Cross, settled in Britain and built a publishing business, becoming a prominent media owner. The supplied article text ends part-way through its account of his life, so it does not include further details of his business collapse.