Deborah Friedell

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...

Psychologists who swear by the Rorschach often say they came to it only after initial scepticism, and they have the zeal of converts. Their stories often share a similar structure: distrust followed by an instance of a single subject who had seemed unremarkable apart from some strange scores on the Rorschach, then bam!, the psychologist reads in the newspaper that the subject has disemboweled an entire Girl Scout troop.