I was recently asked whether REM had made any other albums like 1992’s beauty, Automatic for the People. That moody, ballady hit album had a carefully worked quasi-acoustic surface that made it sound almost mainstream. Trouble is, REM tend not to repeat themselves very often. Out of Time, the album before Automatic for the People, […]

The David Gleason Column The great conundrum for all South Africans as the year winds down is what will happen to interest rates and why are they still so incredibly high. Before May this year, international investors saw South Africa as one of the more reliable and stable of the emerging markets. They invested heavily, […]

Stewart Dalby Spending It Antique clocks belong to an area of collecting, like Impressionist paintings, coins and vintage cars, which crashed in the early Nineties. This was because they were bought for investment. Why grandfather and other clocks should have been sought for speculative purposes is curious. Antique clocks are quintessentially English. It was not […]

Jardine Howard Barrell There is growing concern in government circles over the extraordinary public attack this week by the Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, Lionel Mtshali, on his Director General, Roger Jardine, who recently announced his resignation. In a statement from abroad on Wednesday, where he is on a visit, Mtshali implied that […]

from the inquest courts Leading human rights lawyer George Bizos has written an account of inquests into the deaths of people who died in detention under apartheid. This is an edited extract from the book After its passage through Parliament in 1963, the detention without trial law soon claimed its first victim. On August 20 […]

Sechaba ka’Nkosi Agusta, the company which won a R2,2- billion contract last week to supply the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) with 40 A109 helicopters, has been implicated in a multimillion- dollar corruption trial in Belgium. The company has been accused of bribing politicians in an attempt to win defence contracts. Last week it […]

Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week Is director Brian de Palma a sick puppy? I think not. Often vilified for his obsessive use of violence and his voyeuristic style of exploitation, he is nevertheless a master cinematic stylist. De Palma, whose latest film Snake Eyes opens next week, has directed 25 movies, all exquisitely visually […]

Charl Blignaut Oom Paul Kruger’s statue has stood for 44 years on Church Square in Pretoria, watching nothing changing at all. Unlike Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s bust on Red Square, he may survive the shake-up planned for the capital’s inner city. If all goes according to plan, Oom Paul will find himself in the centre of […]

There were so many irritating presumptions in Joan Smith’s column, “Why women don’t cruise” (November 13 to 19), that it’s difficult to know where to begin to protest them. Shaun de Waal’s response in last week’s First Person took a considered look at the implications of Smith’s article for the nature/culture debate, but was, in […]