When Rupert Murdoch divorced his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, in August 2022 he made her sign an agreement that she would not give any story ideas to the writers of Succession. Frankly he need not have bothered, because it’s all here in this utterly gripping book. The award-winning journalist Gabriel Sherman has been reporting on the Murdochs since 2008 and has interviewed them all at one time or another, so he really knows his stuff. He briskly covers Rupert’s entire career but concentrates on the man’s relationships with his children and the war of succession.

Rupert was always an absentee father who put business before family. He divorced his first wife, Patricia Booker, when their daughter Prudence was only nine, and she rarely saw him. Anna Torv, his second wife, was so keen that he should see their children, Elisabeth, Lachlan and James, that she made them get up at dawn so they could have breakfast with their father on his fleeting visits home. He gave them newspapers, which they were expected to critique. Shop talk was the only conversation that interested him. ‘We don’t talk about our personal affairs,’ Lachlan once said. ‘But we can talk about business forever.’ The children were sent to work at his newspapers during school holidays. Lachlan enjoyed it – he was closest to his father. James was more rebellious and intellectual. Elisabeth was whip-smart, but only a girl.

Anna published a prescient novel, Family Business, in 1987 about a media dynasty that implodes when the patriarch dies and the children battle for control. So when Rupert suddenly demanded a divorce after 31 years of marriage, Anna made him set up an ‘irrevocable’ trust in Nevada, to ensure that all four........

© The Spectator