Rupert Murdoch: The Master Mogul of Fleet Street edited
by Graydon Carter
Vanity Fair (e-book)

In 1999 William Shawcross conducted a series of interviews with Rupert Murdoch shortly after the media tycoon had divorced his wife of 31 years to marry Wendi Deng. Among the questions Shawcross asked was: 'What would you feel if someone published a tape of an intimate telephone conversation of yours?' Murdoch responded: 'I'm too careful to have those sorts of conversations!' Snippets like that are fascinating in hindsight and justify this Vanity Fair compilation of articles. Michael Wolff and James Wolcott are among the other writers granted time with the patriarch, and whose feature stories range from who will succeed Murdoch (at the time three of his children, Elisabeth, Lachlan and James were in contention) to what it was like to work for the 20th-century 'Sun King' (by Andrew Neil, who ran Murdoch's Sunday Times for 11 years). Improbably, given his recent performance at the phone-hacking hearings in London, James Murdoch is the most likable, and his father does not come across as the tyrant one might assume him to be.