Richard Gott

Jacqueline Rose shares Bill Weatherby’s apparent surprise that he found himself Marilyn Monroe’s confidant (LRB, 26 April). Perhaps she would have understood more quickly if she had known that Bill was gay. Weatherby was an immensely shy and private reporter who had escaped from the Guardian’s Manchester newsroom at the end of the 1950s to establish himself in New York as a showbiz correspondent...

The Mau Mau practice of obliging its activists to swear secret oaths of allegiance, referred to by Bernard Porter (LRB, 3 March), was by no means confined to Kenya. The phenomenon was common to many rebel organisations throughout the history of the British Empire, and deliberately mirrored a long-established British tradition. Instead of swearing loyalty to the British monarch on the Bible, a procedure...

What a brilliant pastiche by R.W. Johnson (LRB, 10 May) of a Daily Telegraph journalist visiting post-independence Africa in the 1960s. The unfortunate breakdown of the Volkswagen, the roads decaying ‘along with everything else’, the country ‘gripped’ in a fuel crisis, and a maize field burnt dry, a clear indication ‘of approaching famine’. When the intrepid reporter meets African women...

Leo Zaibert (Letters, 1 June) accuses me of naivety and optimism, because I wrote positively about the Venezuelan Government of Hugo Chávez. It is safer, of course, to greet every new development in Latin America with cynicism. For the moment, however, Chávez's project appears to be the most interesting development in Latin America for many years. He has staked his reputation on rooting out the corruption...