Deborah Friedell

After she wrote The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood created sci-fi dystopias – she prefers the term ‘speculative fiction’ – chock-full of viral pandemics, antibiotic resistance, mass flooding and forest fires, crop failure, mass extinction. No current anxiety is left behind. Governments become subservient to wicked multinationals; every other child has autism; coastal cities disappear one by one. In these novels, the status of women is no longer in dispute, just in time for the world to end, in a surfeit of ways, including starvation as a result of overpopulation. Atwood herself seemed to have moved on from the concerns of Gilead, even if her fans hadn’t, but then, she says, Trump’s election ‘put wind in my sails’. She wanted to answer the question: how does Gilead end?

For months​ after I was summoned to appear for jury duty in North London, I couldn’t stop asking people – in England, in America – if they’d ever been called up too. The question worked less well here, where 65 per cent of people will never be jurors, but nearly all the Americans I talked to seemed to have done it – or to have got out of it by saying ‘I...

Elizabeth Holmes was said to be the ‘youngest self-made female billionaire’ of all time. And why not? Her invention was going to be the reason people – Americans first, but eventually everyone in the world – would lead better, healthier, longer lives. Why shouldn’t she have a private jet, a private chef, a team of bodyguards who would say into their mouthpieces: ‘Eagle One is on the move’? She would tell her investors: ‘We’re in a market for people who don’t like having a needle stuck in their arm.’ That is: her market was everyone who isn’t a masochist.

‘Have I told you about my old friend who’s married to the Republican governor of Missouri?’ Too often, the answer was yes, I had – sometimes more than once. My Sheena story was my best story, the anecdote that rarely failed, which was fortunate, because I couldn’t stop telling it, usually in the same way, even with the same pauses and hand gestures. At the end, I would play on my phone one of Eric’s earliest campaign ads, in which he shoots a machine gun into a field as he promises to take ‘dead aim at politics as usual’. ‘If you’re ready for a conservative outsider,’ he says, ‘I’m ready to fire away.’

Behind​ the White House, next to Blair House, is the formidable Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Murder Is Her Hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (until 28 January) exhibits 19 ‘nutshells’, each one an exquisite example of miniature art in which a little doll has been stabbed to death, or drowned in the bath, or...