Ninety-four years ago this week, the 'greatest medical holocaust in history' began when United States army cook Albert Gitchell reported sick one morning. By midday, his doctor had seen 107 men with the same symptoms. The Spanish influenza virus is believed to have killed more people in 24 weeks than Aids killed in as many years. As the US surgeon general observed, '... civilisation could easily disappear from the face of the Earth within a few weeks', as recounted in a history of the epidemic by John Barry ...
The expertise Barry gained researching The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History and Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 saw him appointed as a key US government adviser on disaster relief. Barry's first book, The Ambition and the Power: A True Story of Washington, was named by The New York Times as one of the 11 best books ever written on the US Congress and focused on the use of power by a rising Newt Gingrich ...
Gingrich's matrimonial record (he's been married three times, seemingly replacing each incumbent when their health began to decline) stands in stark contrast to his Christian faith. Of his first wife, his former geometry teacher, he is reported to have told his campaign treasurer: 'She isn't young enough or pretty enough to be the president's wife. And besides, she has cancer.' Gingrich's political record could be viewed as more successful. In 1968, he was appointed a regional director for would-be US vice-president Nelson Rockefeller ...
The Rockefeller family's wealth was rooted in oil but each generation became renowned for philanthropy. Numerous organisations and structures exist as testament to the family's generosity, the Rockefeller Center in New York being perhaps the most well known. The largest private building project in modern times was built on a site that had been home to a five-storey Bergdorf Goodman department store ...
Herman Bergdorf would have remained a humble tailor had his sister, a secretary to a society lady, not worn one of his suits to work. Her boss was so impressed she ordered one for herself. Soon Bergdorf was inundated with orders. To keep up with demand he hired one Edwin Goodman. As soon as Goodman was up to speed, Bergdorf popped the champagne cork and never looked back. The store remains a symbol of wealth and privilege, as personified in the book Bergdorf Blondes, by Plum Sykes ...
The British socialite and Vogue 'It girl' comes from literary stock - her grandfather was friend and biographer to Evelyn Waugh. Her great-grandfather, Sir Mark Sykes, helped draw up the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, which sought to divvy up bits of the Ottoman empire. In 2007, his body was exhumed, 88 years after it had been buried in a coffin that had been lead-lined for the purpose of preserving particles of the virus that killed him: Spanish influenza.