HOW do you spell supersede? Thirty years ago I challenged Captain Robert Maxwell with a spelling test at the launch of the Dictionary of Perfect Spelling, published by his Pergamon Press and compiled by his daughter Christine. He got nought out of three (he couldn’t spell aficionado or depredate either.) “But then I only came to England at 17,” he boomed, “and I have no formal education”.

Yesterday morning, over Buck’s Fizz and croissants at a Westminster club, four of the clan Maxwell (Ian, Anne, Christine and Kevin’s wife Pandora) gathered to announce an updated edition. Christine, 55, arrived on crutches, having broken her ankle.

Someone decided that the plaster would be a good place to test everyone’s spelling: Pandora essayed “iridescent” correctly while Anne wrote “farsical!” and Ian was left with “vilify”.

In middle age the Maxwell siblings remain close and their exuberant good humour is striking. They are unbruised by their years under the thumb of their tyrannical father, who died in 1991.

Ian says: “There’s an old Chinese proverb, ‘Never be so far from the Sun that you freeze. Never be so close to the Sun that you burn’. I think we all agree that you trod a narrow line with my father. When you’re in outer darkness, having blotted your copybook, as I did when he fired me, you have a horrible time. But when you are on top of the pile, it’s almost suffocating and you don’t have a life of your own.”

Christine laughs at the memory of leaving school with four E-grades at A level (while her twin Isabel sailed into Oxford) and being turned down everywhere. “I’m more a creative thinker,” she says. “So here I am with four ruddy Es, and I had this epiphany — ‘Maybe they’ll have me at an American university, Daddy’.”

Maxwell telephoned a friend, and Christine was interviewed at several Ivy League colleges — “and I got into all of them, hah! I’m good at interviews: after 15 years of dinner with my father — ‘What did you say, you totally idiot person?’ which made you want to drop through the floorboards — nothing was ever so bad again”.

At college in southern California “I made friends who liked me for myself — nobody knew who my father was. I really came into my own”.

She qualified as a teacher and it was at an Oxford state school that she realised pupils could not use a dictionary because they could not spell the word they were looking up. She suggested her perfect-spelling dictionary to her father, asked advice from the great OED editor Robert Burchfield and compiled it on index cards, in those pre-electronic days.

Why, in the spellcheck era, the new edition? “Popular demand. Standards haven’t improved and there are so many people in Britain new to English.” There had also been many changes in vocabulary, she added. “There are far more food words — crème fraîche, fettucini — the internet words and far fewer obtuse words.”

Christine, living in France, where her husband runs a space laboratory, is the creator of an early internet business telephone directory and the online directory Magellan. When Magellan was sold to Excite for £18 million, she and her sister made The Sunday Times Rich List. “I had to laugh,” she says. “They thought we just split the loot — but we had 40 investors.” Still, she was able to help the family when they were in dire straits and has created another internet company, Chiliad.

I asked Ian, a publishing consultant, whether it was still a handicap, nearly ten years after the court case in which he and Kevin were acquitted, to be Robert Maxwell’s son. “I would have to say that from an institutional viewpoint, probably yes. In the City there still tends to be a knee-jerk reaction.”

Their mother is now an elegant 84 and still active in the field of Jewish-Christian friendship. Her children speak warmly of their father.

“I think it has to be left to history, when cooler heads prevail, to appreciate the pioneering vision he had, in 40 years of publishing,” Christine said.

He was not such a bully, Anne says. “He really loved us too, you know. Late in life he said to me, ‘When I die, you’ll shed some tears, but it won’t be for long.’ How wrong he was. I miss him terribly.”

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