Johanneson

In the late 1960s, early 70s, I went to Leeds Utd games. Albert Johanneson, the first black footballer to play in an FA Cup final, was a regular, and got monkey chants every game. He died alone in a Leeds council flat in 1995, his body not discovered for a week.

Same period, 1960s, I was at school and being taught history to A-level: Henry VIII and his plenty wives, Empire, maybe a mention of William Wilberforce but no mention at all of Britain’s complicity in and profits from slavery. I got an A-star. It helped get me into Cambridge.

The UK voted in an Eton and Oxford-educated buffoon PM with no intelligence or expertise in anything, not even Latin, who is very deliberately promoting unnecessary deaths of people whose protection is his job, and the US has a perfect idiot who is responding with blind violence to protest. Same story.

Todd McEwen’s Who Sleeps with Katz, deeply humane and funny and angry, is actually not published today, there’s a mistake out there, but on the 18th of this month. Two publication dates, why not. This book, every day: Who Sleeps with Katz.