Discover the Best Books Written by Tom Bower

Thomas Michael Bower is a British writer and former BBC journalist, and television producer. He is known for his investigative journalism and for his unauthorized biographies, often of business tycoons and newspaper proprietors. His books include unauthorized biographies of Robert Maxwell, Mohamed Al-Fayed, Conrad Black, Richard Branson, Jeremy Corbyn, and Boris Johnson. A book about Richard Desmond remains unpublished. 

His book, Broken Dreams: Vanity, Greed and the Souring of British Football, won the 2003 William Hill Sports Book of the Year. Bower was born in London in 1946. His parents were Jewish refugees who fled Prague after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and arrived in London later that same year. They married in London in early 1943. In 1948, Tom's father, Jiri Gerhard Bauer, renounced the use of the surname Bauer for the family and called himself George Gerald Bower, a change he confirmed by deed poll on 15 May 1957.

After attending the William Ellis School in Hampstead, Bower studied law at the London School of Economics before working as a barrister for the National Council of Civil Liberties. Bower says that during this period, he was a Marxist, nicknamed "Tommy the Red." In 1970, Bower joined the BBC as a researcher on the program 24 Hours before becoming a reporter on Panorama. He was a producer on Panorama from 1975 until 1987. He left the BBC in 1995.

Bower's first book was Blind Eye to Murder (1980), the first exposé based on eyewitnesses and newly released archives in London and Washington of the Allied failure after 1945 to hunt down Nazi war criminals and de-Nazify West Germany. The book was serialized for 5 days in The Times and was the basis of a BBC TV documentary.

Bower's second book was Klaus Barbie: The Butcher of Lyon (1984), which documented Klaus Barbie's war crimes during World War II as head of the Gestapo in Lyon, Germany, and his post-war work for the American intelligence agency Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) and South American narcotics and arms dealers. Bower's book was serialized in The Times in September 1983. Neal Ascherson positively reviewed the book in The Observer in January 1984.

In 1987, Robert Maxwell responded to the publication of two unauthorized biographies of himself with numerous lawsuits, threats of legal action against individual booksellers, and the rapid publication of an authorized biography by Joe Haines, political editor of the Mirror Group, which Maxwell owned. Of the two unauthorized books, Maxwell: A Portrait of Power by Peter Thompson and Anthony Delano was withdrawn from sale. All unsold copies were pulped after Maxwell successfully sued the publishers and authors for libel. 

The second book, Maxwell: The Outsider by Bower, sold out in hardback. Still, Maxwell prevented the paperback edition from appearing, in part by buying the publishing company which held the paperback rights. Maxwell also filed a libel action against Bower and the hardback publisher Aurum Press. Maxwell allowed this action to lapse in 1990 but only after Bower and Aurum had submitted a detailed defense of the book.

Maxwell also tried to sue Bower in the English courts over an article published in America, by the magazine The New Republic, on the basis that it had 136 British subscribers. Bower also believes that Maxwell tried to break into his house and also went through his phone records and bank statements.