Both children of professors, they were best friends and fierce rivals who followed each other to Yale, which Michael Laudor blazed through in three years.

Then Jonathan Rosen received a devastating call: Michael was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, his law school graduation made the New York Times with film rights snapped up by Ron Howard. But then, in the grip of psychosis, he committed a horrific act that made him a front-page story of an entirely different sort. The novelist and The Talmud and the Internet author discusses The Best Minds, described by The Guardian as “Extraordinary…a remarkable meditation on friendship, success, madness and violence”. In conversation with clinical psychologist, author and Mortal Secrets writer Frank Tallis.