JFK planned to order the invasion and deliver the speech if Soviet ships carrying nuclear missiles arrived in Cuba during the 13 tense days of the Cuban Missile Crisis

What, this chap created a religion?

The Kennedys may be America's most famous political dynasty, but it took one of their own to get them to open up about their private lives and their place in U.S. history.

With the death of Gore Vidal, US literature loses a master of contempt. With his Roman-senator looks and his curled-lip disdain for lesser mortals, Vidal was a brilliant hater. Acid ran in his veins. Insults were the air he breathed. Put-downs were the bulk of his discourse. He said the three saddest words in the English language were "Joyce Carol Oates". He remarked that Andy Warhol was "the only genius I know of with an IQ of 60" (he later revised this to 20.) He was even rude about English cities. Standing in a rainy Midlands literary festival he once told an interviewer, with heavy sarcasm: "I count a year wasted that does not include a visit to..." (pause) "Bir-ming-ham."

Seven weeks after she hanged herself, Mary Richardson Kennedy was reburied in a Cape Cod cemetery 700 feet from her original grave near other Kennedy family members.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr's accusations about his estranged wife's behaviour before her suicide amounted to "a brutal psychological weapon", her family said.

The suicide of Bobby's daughter-in-law re-opens the old debate. By Rupert Cornwall

The death of Mary Richardson Kennedy has once again thrown the spotlight on the goldfish bowl that is life in America's most famous family

The curse of the Kennedy family has struck again after Mary Richardson Kennedy, the estranged wife of Robert F Kennedy Jr, was found dead today.

Jeremy Tigue, the fund manager behind the £2bn-plus Foreign & Colonial (F&C) investment trust, yesterday said profit and dividend growth from the companies it invests in is set to slow down in 2012 alongside fewer takeover bids.

Sonia Pierre, a human rights activist who had fought discrimination against Dominicans of Haitian descent since she was a child, died on 4 December following a heart attack at the age of 48. For decades her activism had made her the target of threats in the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, but it earned her recognition from overseas as a defender of human rights, including an award from Amnesty International in 2003.

Beryl Bainbridge's almost-finished but still frustrating final novel is a terse and pared back picaresque, set in the year of RFK's assassination

Corrie bit-part, and, at last, a Booker-winner at last

Fifty years on, a new play explores what went on during the four months the quartet spent together in 1960.