Marista Leishman, the daughter of Lord Reith, yesterday told the Edinburgh international book festival about her troubled childhood dodging her father's "volcanic moods".

"He was a mix between a thunder god and a spoiled child," said the author of My Father: Reith of the BBC. "The domestic scene did not fit very well with him. He was never going to be a bucket-and-spade dad who would join you on the beach."

She said that what drove him on to his achievements with the BBC was anger. "He was a very angry man. He was angry with his parents; he was brought up in a United Free Church manse in Glasgow and had a severely disciplined childhood."

In his 20s Reith, who died in 1971, had a relationship with a teenager, Charlie Bowser. "Reith was a very lonely young man, more or less an outcast in his own family. So when there was someone to admire him - that was badly needed. Today we have to put labels on things - homosexual, bisexual. I just don't know."

According to Leishman, by her late teens "I knew I had to get out of this man's sway because he was leaning on me to become a satellite".

She married her husband, clergyman-turned-psychoanalyst Murray Leishman, in the teeth of her father's opposition. "I remember a group of friends gathering before we were married and one of them said, 'I'd love to meet Lord Reith.' And Murray said, 'So would I.'"