apartheid
Stop moaning and do something: the active vs the passive voice
The story of a friendship and the challenges that arise from different ways of dealing with shared political opinions. Two women bond over anger about world injustice but fall out over how to combat it
Forty years on, the furore over Paul Simon’s Graceland seems almost quaint
The accusations of plagiarism and musical thievery that have dogged the album since its release pale beside OpenAI’s copyright violations
Will Israel always have America’s backing?
The views of today’s young Americans should concern Israelis, says Marc Lynch. With no memory of Israel’s foundations in 1948, they are considerably more pro-Palestinian than their parents
Afrikaners have been endlessly maligned
This I began writing two weeks ago as an overnight guest in a cosy cabin on a farm beside an…
Afrikaner angst: Cato Pedder goes in search of her ancestors
As a descendant of Jan Smuts, Pedder is Afrikaner aristocracy. But she finds the legacy increasingly problematic while researching the lives of her female forebears
From she-devil to heroine
Jonny Steinberg describes Nelson and Winnie’s doomed marriage, and how their posthumous reputations have undergone a startling reversal
A courtroom giant
Sydney Kentridge, the protagonist of Thomas Grant’s superb legal saga The Mandela Brief, is that trickiest of biographical subjects: a…
My fans say I could have won the Nobel – if it wasn’t for the bizarre sex
The family ranch, which my father acquired when I was about six years of age, lay along the banks of…
Hostage to misfortune
Nordic noir is passé. Now we have Israeli noir. Waking Lions is a mordant thriller written by a clinical psychologist…
Long life
The Parish Church of St Luke in Sydney Street, Chelsea, is enormous. Vaguely reminiscent of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, it…
Hope against hope
At the eye of apartheid South Africa’s storm of insanities was a mania for categorisation. Everything belonged in its place,…
A place of rough justice
There are writers whose prose style is so fluid, so easy, the reader feels as though he has been taken…
