Deborah Friedell

The Gettys​ were one of the richest families in the world, and Gavin Newsom’s father was their ‘consigliere’. In 1973, when John Paul Getty III was kidnapped by the Calabrian mafia, it fell to Bill Newsom to fly to Italy to get him back. At first he suspected that his godson – ‘Little Paul’, a trust fund kid locked out of his trust – might have...

Donald Trump​ began seriously thinking about running for office in 1998, so it’s said, when the wrestler Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura won the Minnesota governorship on the Reform Party ticket. Ventura’s campaign had been dismissed as a sideshow by Democrats and Republicans alike. He was no one’s idea of a professional politician and he made that the point. Only a...

When Samuel Pepys​, wifeless and childless, died in 1703, the pride of his life – three thousand books, lavishly gilded and bound in brown leather – passed to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he had once been a student. The college had scarcely any record of him apart from a reprimand for ‘having been scandalously overseen in drink’, but that no longer mattered....

Elon Musk​ bought Twitter because he loved it. He loved tweeting poop emojis at dawn; he loved tweeting masturbation jokes at dusk. He loved that he had more Twitter followers than almost anyone else, though it galled that Barack Obama and Justin Bieber had more. While other celebrity social media accounts were often so sanitised that they smelled of chlorine – ‘Happy Tuesday...

In​ the first pages of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016), J.D. Vance admits that he’s ‘especially skilful’ at charming older men. His mother has had many boyfriends, as well as five husbands, and Vance spent his childhood ‘navigating various father figures’. He flattered them, ‘pretended to like them’, and would...