This note is a brief history of how the theory of Ginzburg and Landau came to be. Early publications on the macroscopic theory of superconductivity are reviewed in detail. Discussions that the two co-authors had with their colleagues and between themselves are described. The 1952 review by V L Ginzburg is discussed, in which a number of well-defined requirements on the yet-to-be-developed microscopic theory of superconductivity were formulated, constituting what J Bardeen called the ’Ginzburg energy gap model’.