`Send her back," was Margaret Whitmore's mother's reaction on learning that her second baby, like the first, was a girl.
Fifty-three years later the rejection was much more public when, as wife of British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, Margaret's marriage ended in a VIP waiting-room at Heathrow airport, after Cook told her his affair with his secretary was to be the subject of a splash in the next day's News of the World. However, there's a silver lining to every cloud, and Dr Margaret Cook seems to have successfully reinvented herself, with a new life as an "agony aunt" and newspaper columnist. Haematologist she might be, but the cuts she inflicts expertly in her book about life with Robin, and its abrupt end, also suggest skill as a surgeon. Rarely a chance is missed for a stab about the gnome-like Scot's ego, complacency and ambition. The key to their story, perhaps, comes on page 167 of the paperback edition, where Margaret states: "I did not function well as an appendage."