Robert Maxwell

A single one of his ten planets sits in a fire sign. Water takes four, air three and earth two. The chart holds no closed figure of any kind. Jupiter and Saturn were the two retrograde planets. The record says Maxwell escaped Czechoslovakia, won the Military Cross, built a publishing empire and stole about four hundred million pounds from his own employees' pension funds, and that he fell from his yacht in 1991.

Jupiter sits in easy contact with Pluto at two hundredths of a degree, as exact as this project prints, and the reading is effective power, glossed as reform that succeeds and as the ability to recover from setbacks at scale. Landed on that record, the phrase does something worth noticing about the whole vocabulary: it has no moral content at all. Effective power describes building a publishing empire and describes taking four hundred million pounds out of other people's pensions equally well, because the words do not distinguish between the two. A reader who takes the fit as approval has been misled by a dictionary rather than by a chart.

The Sun sits square Uranus at just over a degree, read as restlessness and as a pattern of leaving things just before they mature. The record's first word is escaped, and that is the distinction this entry has to keep. Escaping a country is something done under compulsion from outside, and a reading about restlessness describes a temperament from inside. They are not the same fact and nothing in the chart can tell a reader which of the two was operating.

His Moon sits on the third degree of Taurus at noon with Aries still possible, so it is left out, and the tightest contact in the chart goes with it, a hard angle to Uranus at one hundredth of a degree. The record's own word for his death is fell, and this entry keeps it rather than improving on it. He died in the Atlantic Ocean on 5 November 1991, at sixty eight. Two contacts that day came inside a fiftieth of a degree, Jupiter sixty degrees from his natal Pluto and Jupiter sixty degrees from its own birth place, which is the sort of coincidence that looks like a great deal and is worth nothing. The Moon was balsamic and one per cent lit.