Nigel Cawthorne is a prolific writer. Four of his publishers tell him that he is the most published living author in the UK. This is difficult to verify as he works under many different names and assumes other writers do too.

He was born in Wolverhampton and was brought up in what was then rural Surrey, now commuter belt. His first job was milking cows.

The Joys of Journalism

He went to London to study physics at University College London. To support himself, he became a printer’s message. At IPC Business Press, he spotted a wanted ad on the notice board for a features writer on Nuclear Engineering International. He applied immediately. Instead he was offered job on a weekly tabloid for the white goods trade called the Electrical and Electronic Trader.

He fled to the US after having an affair with a gangster’s wife. As an illegal immigrant he wrote for pornographic magazines in New York. Then a new newspaper called The New York Trib started. He began writing for it. When it failed, he was employed by the Financial Times, then went freelance.

Troublesome Books

After a trip to Hanoi, he wrote The Bamboo Cage, showing that US servicemen were held prisoner in southeast Asia after the Vietnam war. Although the book was not published in the US, he was called to testify to the US Senate. He followed up with The Iron Cage, showing 31,000 British prisoners of war disappeared into the Soviet gulags in 1945. Questions were asked in both Houses of Parliament.

Full-time Author

Deciding to write books full time, he started with Takin’ Back My Name – The Confessions of Ike Turner and went on to write the twelve-volume Sex Lives… series, beginning with Sex Lives of the Popes, which was a bestseller in Brazil. Other titles included Sex Lives of the US Presidents which led to an appearance on The Joan Rivers Show.

More Media

Serious books followed, garnering large advances and great reviews. Most recently, he wrote Prince Andrew, Epstein and the Palace which got him in the press and on TV worldwide.

He has now published 226 books as Nigel Cawthorne, Al Cimino, Alexander Macdonald, Gordon Bowers, Opel Streisand, Karl Streisand, Owen Wilson and Sam Kimberley.

‘Part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich’

But that’s just part of it. His fingers, too, are ‘long and beautiful’. Improbably coiffed, perma-tanned and bronze-tongued, the Donald has increasingly impinged on the world’s consciousness through a string of startling pronouncements.

From his preference for war heroes who have not been captured, to his references to his sleeping around in the 1980s as his ‘personal Vietnam’ or this – ‘My grandparents didn’t come to America all the way from Germany to see it get taken over by immigrants’ – Trump’s utterances are nothing if not intriguing.

As he once said, and to date this has been hard to dispute, he ‘could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and [he] wouldn’t lose any voters.’

Here, in his own words, is the businessmen, the dealmaker, TV personality, author and one-time Democrat, now Republican who would be president of the United States.

Over the Easter weekend in 2015, an audacious gang of criminals robbed a safe depository in London’s Hatton Garden, the centre of the UK’s diamond trade. Shortly before, electrical cables under nearby Kingsway had caught on fire, disrupting the emergency services in the area. Coincidence?

Alarms at Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd went off, but the police ignored them. The burglars were caught on CCTV taking jewellery worth up to £20 million. They had used specialist equipment, taking days to tunnel through the walls of the vault.

Within a month nine suspects had been arrested and valuables seized from their homes. They were aged between forty-three and seventy-six, including a father and son. The question was, were they the same gang that had made a similar daring raid in Hatton Garden safe netting £1.5 million over the Christmas holiday in 2004. The culprits then were never caught.

In 1986, a similar heist had taken place in Los Angeles where a gang drilled a 100-foot tunnel from a storm drain into the vaults of the First Interstate Band in West Hollywood. It inspired the novel The Black Echo. Author Michael Connelly believes his book might have inspired the Hatton Garden heists, and has a grudging respect for the criminals.

“There is no violence and they sweated for the money. And there is a certain class envy,” he said. “We don’t feel too sorry for people who keep fortunes hidden away in safety deposit boxes. Part of us hopes the gang members are now lying on a beach somewhere.”

However, was the Hatton Garden heist so victimless? There have been suggestions that the safety deposit raid was linked to the murder of John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer – a suspect in the 1983 Brink’s-Mat bullion robbery who was gunned down in Essex in July. The question remains: was Palmer killed for tipping off police about possible suspects?

London abounds with all manner of ludicrous laws, and not all of these curious statutes have been relegated to the past. Despite the efforts of the Law Commission there are medieval laws that are still in force, and the City of London and its livery companies have their own legal oddities. Laws are made in the capital because parliament is here; so are the Old Bailey, the Law Courts, the House of Lords and, now, the Supreme Court. The privy council, which sometimes has to decide cases, also sits in London, and there were other courts that used to sit in London, from prize courts concerning war booty to ecclesiastical courts.

Having maintained its ‘ancient rights and freedoms’ under Magna Carta, the City felt free to enact its own laws, many of which seem to have had to do with what people could wear. Until quite recently, for example, a man could be arrested for walking down the street wearing a wig, a robe and silk stockings – unless he was a judge.

And all human folly has been paraded through the law courts of London, to the extent that it is difficult to know where the serious business of administering justice ends and where farce begins. As law is made in the courtroom as well as in parliament and elsewhere, judges like to keep a firm hand, but sometimes so-called jibbing juries will simply not do what they are told.

All sorts of oddities get swept up into the law. Legislators particularly love to pass Acts about sex. If sexual services are being offered in a London massage parlour, for example, a police officer must then search the premises for school children. According to The Children and Young Persons Act of 1933 it is against the law for children and ‘yowling persons’ between the age of four and sixteen to frequent a brothel.

A writ was introduced under both Edward III and Henry IV to ban lawyers from parliament as there were too many of them, the reason being that it was easier for a lawyer to spend his time in London attending parliament that it was for a knight of the shires. But because parliament was already packed with lawyers it was difficult to make any such rule stick. Then an effective way of excluding them was found. They were denied the wages paid to members in those days. Sadly, these days, parliament and the government are packed with lawyers once again. And they are being paid.

A law passed in 1540 – and still in force today – makes it illegal for barbers in the City of London to practise surgery; with impeccable impartiality, the Act also forbids surgeons to cut hair.

Finally, never forget that under the Vagrancy Act of 1824, you can be convicted of being ‘an idle and disorderly person, or a rogue, vagabond, or incorrigible rogue’. The same act also outlaws people ‘professing to tell fortunes’, including ‘palmistry’. Under the Act, it is an offence merely to be suspected.

Its every parent’s worst fear, but it also makes for the most compelling stories of strength and courage. Here are the appallingly true tales of horrific kidnappings and torturous ordeals suffered by helpless girls – as well as every excruciating and yet amazing detail of how they managed to survive. Delving into the minds of twisted criminals who hold young women in endless captivity and telling every excruciating detail of the brave survivors’ stories, “Against Their Will” is the first comprehensive compendium to describe the most disturbing kidnappings of all time. There’s Jaycee Lee Dugard, who lived in her captor’s backyard in a California suburb for 18 horrifying years, and Elizabeth Smart, taken from her bed in Salt Lake City and forced to marry a religious fanatic. “Against Their Will” presents minute-by-minute accounts of the abductions and the year-by-year suffering of these young victims who went through every woman’s worst nightmare and lived to tell the tale. Covering infamous cases as well as lesser-known abductions, this collection of terrifying ordeals is the first of its kind. It even probes the bizarre instances when the kidnapper’s family is complicit, as with Colleen Stan, whose captor Cameron Hooker kept her as a sex slave with permission from his wife. It also profiles serial kidnappers such as John Jamelske and Gary Heidnik, who committed this perverse crime 11 times between them.

Spree Killers presents terrifyingly gripping stories of 45 spree killers, from the first recorded incident in 1913 through to the most recent high school and shopping centre massacres.

Spree killers are probably the most notorious of all multiple murderers, yet these criminals repel and fascinate us more than any other.

It is difficult to understand why these perpetrators committed mass murder, since many were killed by the police at the end of their sprees and are therefore unanswerable to their crimes.

Those who survived are usually certified insane – famously when Brenda Spencer, who killed two people and wounded nine, was asked why she had done it, she simply replied: ‘I don’t like Monday.’

This investigation into spree killing analyses the psychology of this chilling and relatively new phenomenon. Cawthorne carefully examines each case and shows how the killers suppress their rage and violent fantasies until a small incident sparks off their fatal rampage.

The cases include that of Michael Ryan, who slew sixteen in the quiet English town of Hungerford; Wade Frankum, who went berserk with a rifle in a shopping plaza in Sydney, Australia; teenage students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and their killing spree at Columbine High School in Colorado, USA; Seung-Hui Cho, responsible for the Virginia Tech massacre, the deadliest shooting frenzy by a single gunman in the history of the USA; and the incident with Isaac Zamora in Mount Vernon, Washington State.

On 3 August 2012, as London was gripped by the Olympics, Tia Sharp, a 12-year-old schoolgirl, was reported missing from her grandmother’s home in New Addington, south London. A call made by her mother, Natalie, alerted police to Tia’s disappearance and so began a massive search operation to find the missing girl. Police were seconded from the Olympic village to make house-to-house enquiries, while locals searched the nearby area. A Twitter campaign began, sparking a nationwide appeal to find Tia, and the story dominated national newspaper headlines and television news. Tia’s family, including her step-grandfather, 37-year-old Stuart Hazell, and her grandmother, Christine, made a public appeal to find Tia. It was reported that Tia had disappeared after being dropped off at a train station to go shopping, but in the days that followed a different story emerged. Only seven days after Tia was reported missing, the terrible news came that the family hoped they would ever have to hear; Tia’s body, wrapped in bin bags, had been found in her grandmother’s attic. The truth that unfolded over the course of the day horrified the public; not only had the police searched the house on three separate occasions before discovering Tia’ body, late the following evening, Stuart Hazell – the man who Tia trusted, the man who appealed for her return – was charged with her murder. Tia Sharp: A Family Betrayal examines the appalling case of an evil step-grandfather who betrayed his families trust, deceived friends and neighbours, and cut short the life of a young, well-loved girl. An insight into the facts behind the murder, the court case and the aftermath of one of the most shocking crimes a family should never have to face.

In the quiet Austrian town of Amstetten in the balmy spring of April 2008, a truly horrifying vision of hell was discovered by police in the cellar of a normal suburban home. On 28 August 1984, seemingly respectable family man Josef Fritzl had lured Elisabeth, the youngest of his seven children, into the cellar of their family home, where he then drugged and handcuffed her in a windowless dungeon he’d spent years constructing. For the next 24 years Josef held his daughter captive in unimaginable conditions and repeatedly raped her, fathering seven children. When the eldest captive child, Kerstin, was admitted to hospital, Josef’s sickening web of incest and abuse was uncovered by the authorities. This is the full and utterly disturbing true story of what happened in those underground chambers of horror.

The story of fashion from the late 1930s into the advent of Dior’s New Look. This covers the impact of World War II on style and utility clothing and features the work of the major influences of the time, Chanel, Beaton, Parkinson and Bacall.

Tackles the steamy world of movies and their stars, including the sex lives of such heroes as Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, James Dean and Marlon Brando. This book is one of a series that includes “Sex Lives of the Popes” and “Sex Lives of the Kings and Queens of England”.