Home Truths: Life Around My Father

by Penny Junor

John Junor was a brilliant newspaperman. As editor of the Sunday Express for 32 years, he wielded more power than many of the politicians he wrote about, mixing with prime ministers, princes, captains of industry, and film stars. Yet his family life was far from idyllic. He and his wife lived apart for the last 18 years of his life as she tried to rebuild the confidence that he had shattered. Two years after his death, Penny Junor was compelled to set down her father's biography, partly to celebrate the life of a powerful and influential public figure, and partly to come to terms with her own emotionally charged relationship with him.

380 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Born in Leatherhead, Surrey, Junor was educated at the independent Benenden School in Kent and read History at St Andrews University, but left in her second year to get married.

Junor has worked for the Evening Standard and a column for Private Eye lasted five years.

Best known for her books on the British Royal Family, she has written biographies of Diana, Princess of Wales (1982) and Charles, Prince of Wales (1987 and 1998), and Charles and Diana: Portrait of a Marriage (1991). The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor followed in 2005. Her work on the Waleses "alienated" both of them and she reportedly considers the experience the worst of her career. She has also written and had published a book titled Prince William: The Man Who Will Be King. This biography of Prince William ends with his marriage to Kate Middleton, now Duchess of Cambridge.

Junor's other books include works on Margaret Thatcher (1983), actor Richard Burton (1986), John Major (1993) and Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me (2007), the co-authored memoir of Pattie Boyd a former wife of both musicians. Junor assisted Sir Cliff Richard in writing the number one best selling My Life, My Way which sold over 250,000 copies (2008) and Shaun Ellis with his book The Man Who Lives with Wolves (2009).