Deborah Friedell

Elizabeth and Mary were obsessed with each other. Mary was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII; her paternal grandmother was Henry VIII’s older sister, Margaret Tudor. While most of Europe thought of Elizabeth as a bastard – how could a daughter of Anne Boleyn be otherwise? – Mary was as legitimate as they come.

In essays and interviews, Jonathan Franzen acknowledged that his over-full sentences and abstruse metaphors were intended to impress graduate students and his father. Money, fame, the imprimatur of Oprah’s book club: all were to be disdained if they required the approval of middle-aged women who read novels on planes or while recovering from knee surgery – women like his mother. 

The trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg began on 6 March 1951 and lasted sixteen days. The syndicated columnist Inez Robb offered a warning that went out in more than a hundred newspapers: Ethel might appear too dumpy to be a spy, ‘innocuous and vacuous’, but she couldn’t disguise her ‘extremely intelligent’ eyes. 

For researchers interested in schizophrenia, the Galvins seemed like a bonanza: figure out why six of the twelve children got sick, but not the other six, and maybe you could get somewhere. A pharmaceutical company took an interest in them, as did the University of Colorado Health Sciences Centre and the National Institute of Mental Health. Blood was drawn; brainwaves were studied.