Monthly Archives: January 2013

RIP Professor John Makumbe

Photo: Monty Strikes, Harare, 2007 It’s a far cry from Notting Hill, but the death of a remarkable man in Zimbabwe this week couldn’t pass without comment. I was privileged to have met John Makumbe, aka the White Man from … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Remembering Johnny Edge

Johnny’s message to his friends on his 76th birthday Johnny Edgecombe obituary Keeler’s ex-lover, he fired the shots that set off the Profumo affair On a clear December morning in 1962, Johnny Edgecombe, who has died aged 77, fired six … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Ghosts of Notting Hill

Day by day and inch by inch, the old North Kensington disappears. On the Wornington Green estate, a couple of hundred yards from where Kelso Cochrane was murdered, the bulldozers and workmen have moved in. According to Catalyst Housing, the … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Peter Rachman 50 years on

Shirley Green’s definitive 1979 biography After he died, the rumours grew ever more outlandish. They said that he had a penchant for watching naked lady wrestlers; that he wore hand-stitched crocodile shoes and white sharkskin suits; that he was obsessed … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Spot the White

Daniel Trilling, Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain’s Far Right Verso, 240pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781844679591 Six years ago, an 82-year-old with a shiny head, a pink face, and dressed – like the 1950s schoolteacher he once was – in … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment