Those who know them say that what unites them all is the decades-long struggle to escape the shadow of their overbearing father,who would bully and beat his children in an attempt to create a cowed line of succession.
"They were definitely a family crushed by Robert as the all-powerful and sinister patriarch,"recalls the writer Anna Pasternak,who studied at Oxford alongside Ghislaine and whose sister attended birthday parties at the former Maxwell family pile,Headington Hill Hall,in Oxfordshire."This must have been deeply psychologically affecting for them all."
So who makes up the surviving Maxwell clan?
Elisabeth
Once the loyal wife,who would diligently collect every press cutting of her husband,"Betty"was credited for holding the family together in the face of Maxwell's belligerence.
In her 1995 autobiographyA Mind of My Own,largely written to recoup some of her financial losses,she admitted:"Everything was sacrificed on the altar of Bob's genius,and in the end the children and I were to pay a heavy price."
Following Maxwell's death,she became a respected Holocaust historian,tracing his relatives killed during World War II. She received a PhD from Oxford University aged 60 and lectured around the world before settling in the Dordogne region of France,where she died in 2013 aged 92.
Ian and Kevin
The heirs apparent - and the ones hit the hardest by their father's fall. Ian and Kevin were 35 and 32 when their father died,and the offspring most closely associated with the family firm. In 1995,both stood trial for their part in the fraud of the Mirror Group pension fund - with Maxwell having plundered his employees'pensions to shore up his other companies. By that time,Kevin had already been declared Britain's biggest bankrupt,with debts of more than £400 million.
Both sons were acquitted - though a subsequent Whitehall report concluded that Kevin bore a"heavy responsibility"for what had happened. He remains the only child to have alluded to"the moral burden"he bears as a result of his father's crimes.
The pair have since launched a number of businesses. In 2011,Kevin was banned from running a company for eight years,following an investigation by the Insolvency Service into his conduct as a director of Syncro,a Manchester-based construction and maintenance company that collapsed in 2007.
By that stage,his former family home,the Oxfordshire estate of Moulsford Manor,had been sold and he had separated from his wife,Pandora,with whom he has seven children. She once reportedly tried to boost the family's dwindling income by selling £3.50 cream teas.
Pandora still lives in Oxford,where last year she gave a talk at a local community centre on her relationship with Robert Maxwell - a man she has previously described as"the fat fraudster".
A year ago,Ian and Kevin made a surprise return to the public eye,conducting a newspaper interview and announcing that they were starting a counter-extremist think tank called Combating Jihadist Terrorism and Extremism. According to its website,Ian Maxwell remains a director,although there is no clear mention of Kevin.
Their father,who received a state funeral in Israel attended by six serving and former heads of the Jewish state’s intelligence services,was widely believed to have been an agent of Israeli foreign intelligence.
Philip
The eldest and by far the most reclusive of the Maxwell boys. Despite his apparent antipathy to his father,he seems to have inherited something of his famous ability to cover his tracks - Robert Maxwell told a different story about his own emergence from the ruins of post-war central Europe every time a reporter asked.
Philip was a precocious talent and won a scholarship to Balliol College,Oxford,at 16,but later moved to Argentina to get"as far away from my father as possible". He married an Argentinian,but they divorced. Now married again,he is thought to be living quietly in north London and pursuing a career as a writer.
Anne
Maxwell's eldest daughter has settled into a quiet life,well away from the family turmoil. That's perhaps no surprise considering she suffered at the end of some of her father's most barbed comments. After embarking on an unsuccessful acting career,she was once apparently told by Maxwell:"What have you and Pope John Paul II got in common? You're both ugly and you're both failed actors."
After studying at Oxford,she became a Montessori teacher and is now said to be a hypnotherapist in Surrey,practising under another name. She is married to an osteopath,with whom she has a daughter.
Christine and Isabel
At one stage Maxwell's twin daughters appeared the most likely to have inherited his entrepreneurial zeal. The pair madeThe Sunday Times rich list in 1999 after amassing £100 million in the dotcom boom.
In a rare 1998 interview about her then role on the Internet Society Board of Trustees,Christine appeared keen to rehabilitate the family brand.
"Both of my parents,"she said,"had a strong work ethic,which they instilled in me and my brothers and sisters when we were very young. They also communicated a very clear understanding that advantages always come with responsibilities - that there was no such thing as a free ride."
Yet,once again,the Maxwell fortune did not last. By 2001,Isabel's holdings were said to have dropped from £9.5 million to just £300,000. In 2015,the then 65-year-old was declared bankrupt in an order at the High Court. Her profession was described in the bankruptcy order as a"consultant". Twice married,with a grown-up son,she now divides her time between New York and Israel.
Christine,meanwhile,is thought to be living in Provence. A former teacher,she has written a book calledDictionary of Perfect Spelling and is married to an astrophysicist. They have two sons and a daughter.
In 2011,a friend described her circumstances to a newspaper:"By no stretch of the imagination are they wealthy;but they are survivors."
A fitting epitaph for a failed dynasty.
Telegraph,London;withThe Age