Nelson Mandela
Common ground
The Queen’s devotion to the Commonwealth
A courtroom giant
Sydney Kentridge, the protagonist of Thomas Grant’s superb legal saga The Mandela Brief, is that trickiest of biographical subjects: a…
Wild life
Kenya Each time I sit in St Bride’s on Fleet Street during the memorial of another friend, I look around…
What’s behind the South African riots?
South Africa is ablaze once more. In the provinces of KwaZulu-Natal (formerly Natal) and Gauteng (which includes Johannesburg and Pretoria),…
Joe Biden’s broken record
‘Get your words straight, Jack!’ As Joe Biden campaigns for the Oval Office, the 77-year-old frequently recounts his five decades…
Words to rally and inspire: stirring speeches from Elizabeth I to the present
It was a surprise, on reading Speeches of Note, to find myself laughing and chuckling at the speech of a…
In praise of braindead filth
Melvyn Bragg on TV: The Box That Changed The World (BBC2, Saturday) was just what you would have expected of…
The halo slips
Peter Popham is commendably quick off the blocks with this excellent account of the run-up to last November’s Burmese general…
Lost in translation
Trencherman was first published in Afrikaans in 2006 and translated into English for a South African readership shortly afterwards, but…
Long life
How amazing to have two former Anglican archbishops, George Carey of Canterbury and Desmond Tutu of South Africa, supporting Lord…
The Mandela files
His long-lost prison manuscript sheds new light on the president’s politics, smoothed over in ‘Long Walk to Freedom’
Try my resolution for 2014: ignore the internet
At last, it has been scientifically proved that Jesus Christ is better than Muhammad. We’d always known that our lad…
While Mandela lives on
The past few weeks have been an agonising dress rehearsal for the great statesman’s death
