Bloody Brilliant People: The Couples and Partnerships That History Forgot

‘Sometimes, 1+1 = changing the world. Cathy Newman’s witty, warm history on the power of determined couples will make you look at your relationship and wonder, “Could we be doing more this weekend than just going to IKEA?”’ CAITLIN MORAN

Throughout history, collaboration has fuelled greatness. From rivals pressuring each other forwards to friends combining their talents, it’s clear: often two heads are better than one.

Cathy Newman rewrites the history books to expose this strange power of two – the reason Holmes and Watson need to come as a pair, and Apple could not have been started by Steve Jobs alone. Bringing together an extraordinary range of stories from around the world, Newman shows how double acts have relied on each other, how minds have married to usher in miraculous discoveries, and how those we think of as lone geniuses often did not work solo.

How did William and Ellen Craft work together to pull off a perilous cross-country escape from slavery? How did the queer artists Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun become icons of the surrealist movement, then heroines of the resistance during WW2? How do today’s most powerful couples – from Beyoncé and Jay-Z to Bill and Melinda Gates – negotiate coupledom and individual achievement in the spotlight?

Vibrant, feminist and unexpected, this brilliant history shows the value of friction, obsession, difference and trust when it comes to progress – and retrieves the work of many who have been forgotten, asking why certain collaborators are so often left out of the narrative.

Previously published as ‘It Takes Two’.

• FOLLOWING SUCCESS OF BLOODY BRILLIANT WOMEN (25k HB and 15k PB TCM).

• HIGHLY ACCESSIBLE, COMMERCIAL STORYTELLING OF BIG NAME AND LITTLE KNOWN DUOS THROUGH HISTORY.

• FEMINIST AND DIVERSE. This is emphatically a story of people around the world and all the way back to the early modern period, ensuring that women, LGBT+ communities and people of colour are front and centre where they have previously been overlooked.

• RIGHTS THE WRONGS OF HISTORY, giving voice to those whose legacies were eclipsed by their collaborators (often women put in the shadows of men).

• 25 COUPLES, INCLUDING: William and Ellen Craft (escaped slavery), Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddall, Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway, Paul Gaugin and van Gogh, Amala and Kamala (Indian women raised by wolves), John and Jackie Kennedy, Jay-Z and Beyonce, Samuel Beckett and Andre the Giant…

Competition: Bloody Brilliant women;Dead Famous;The Five;Elizabethans;Because of You;how not to be wrong;men who hate women;Word Perfect;Black and British;The Guilty Feminist. Hallie Rubenhold;Mary Portas;Andrew Marr;Dawn French;James O’Brien;Laura Bates;Bettany Hughes;Susie Dent;David Olusoga