South Africa
Add Ben Stokes to the world’s greatest batsmen
On Sunday morning a friend texted: ‘You watching the big bash, or the domestic stuff down in Australia?’ On one…
Fear, loneliness and nostalgia: a return to Johannesburg
Oddly enough, the cabin service people on the plane are constantly eating during the night, helping themselves to the first-class…
Hope against hope
At the eye of apartheid South Africa’s storm of insanities was a mania for categorisation. Everything belonged in its place,…
Rhodes to nowhere
Protesting students in Cape Town may disdain the statue of Cecil Rhodes, yet they do not reject his legacy
Double Dutch
‘Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting,’ Henri Matisse once advised, ‘should begin by cutting out his own tongue.’ Marlene…
A good man in Africa
I would love to sit in on a Jonny Steinberg interview. Over the years this South African writer has perfected…
South Africa: In the footsteps of Mr Clarke
Not everything is forgotten in the new Johannesburg, finds Lara Prendergast
Tales from a strip joint
‘It’s not as bad as I thought it would be,’ said Norman Mailer to his wife, Norris Church, after reading…
Portrait of the week
Home The last British combat troops turned over Camp Bastion in Helmand to Afghan forces and withdrew from Afghanistan after…
Sex, death and good TV
South Africa’s spectacular murder trials – first Oscar Pistorius, now Shrien Dewani – help take minds off other difficulties
Squash hits
Thank god for the Commonwealth Games: at least they gave us a brief respite from football transfer stories. Instead of…
Voice of enchantment
Some of my most enjoyable evenings, when I reviewed opera weekly for The Spectator, were spent at the Royal College…
Low life
Depressed and demoralised after the defeat of his nation of farmers in the second Boer war, Eugène Marais, an Afrikaner…
How to save elephants
The Duke of Cambridge deserves credit for bringing his influence to bear on the growing tragedy of the elephant, whose…
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…
