Deborah Friedell

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...

Robert F. Kennedy Jr​ was nine years old on 22 November 1963 when his mother told him that ‘a bad man shot Uncle Jack.’ He was fourteen, asleep at boarding school, when his father was assassinated at a hotel in Los Angeles. He became used to the sound of people weeping everywhere he went, no matter what he did. He looked so much like his father that ‘even fifty years after...

In​ 1867, Mark Twain went to Europe aboard the Quaker City, the ‘first luxury cruise in American history’. He was underwhelmed by the Titians in the Doge’s Palace – ‘there is nothing tangible about these imaginary portraits, nothing that I can grasp and take a living interest in’ – but awestruck by his tour guide. The man appeared to be – was...