Deborah Friedell is a contributing editor at the LRB.
Roy Cohn has been dead for forty years, but Donald Trump still yearns for him, his first lawyer and his fiercest. Who else could take an attack meant for Trump and return it a thousand – a million! – times harder? He still sometimes calls out for him: ‘Where’s my Roy Cohn?’ No one was better at making him feel indefeasible. The gossip columnist Cindy Adams...
Bill Clinton called the White House the ‘crown jewel of the federal penitentiary system’ but that’s not the way Jill Biden saw it. On becoming first lady, she was transported into a ‘magical place’, an enchanted castle where wishes could be conjured into being. It wasn’t just that she could call down to the kitchen in the middle of the night and summon a cheeseburger, but that the building itself seemed to anticipate her desires.
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....
In 1939, Dorothy Thompson was on the cover of Time, the ‘First Lady of American journalism’ and a major celebrity. By 1945, she’d been widely dismissed as a crank.Deborah Friedell...
Laura Beers and Deborah Friedell talk to Tom about the recent decision by the US Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson, which removed the constitutional right to abortion.
Deborah Friedell talks to Thomas Jones about the Rosenbergs, from their early years on the Lower East Side of New York to their execution for conspiracy to commit espionage in 1953, and the significance...
Deborah Friedell talks to Thomas Jones about the origins, and origin myths, of the National Rifle Association, how it spends its money, and why it's wary of winning.
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