Neil Manthorp in Birmingham Cricket At last, some justice. The final moment of any significance, the last memory of the tour of England, was positive. Not just the victory, but the catch by Jonty Rhodes in the covers. So often we see great feats of athleticism diminished by the television replay. Occasionally they remain untarnished, […]

Stewart Dalby Spending it Travel literature is a field in which the collector would seem spoilt for choice. The variety is vast: exploration, seafaring, biology, outer space, anthropology, derring-do, geography, geology and meteorology. Some people collect modern tourist guides while others collect rare 16th- century books about how the world was first circumnavigated. What would […]

Steve Smith Live in Cape Town I once read this astute statement somewhere (Q magazine, I think): “A significant measure of a band’s ability is how they approach cover songs.” Witnessing a gig shared by Cape Town bands Fever Pussy and Blunt, the accuracy of that yardstick was once again confirmed. One band got it […]

Sandra Spavins EMILY-KATE by Meg Jordan (Iris) This is a story about a little girl who temporarily goes missing on a farm in KwaZulu-Natal. It is a large-format picture book, but has more text than most books of this type. The average eight or nine year old should be able to read it, yet the […]

Howard Barrell Over a Barrel Thabo Mbeki, eloquent wielder of words though he is, has given himself a nigh impossible task: talking up an African revival. How the hell can the deputy president talk of an “African renaissance” when this continent is maimed by murder and misery? Look at Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, […]

An American academic believes the term `world music’ is merely an excuse for music companies to indulge in music cannibalism, writes Anthea Garman In the great age of discovery adventurers like Christopher Columbus sallied forth to explore the planet – with results that have continued to bedevil humanity into this century. Today in a similar […]

Simone de Beauvoir described her companion and fellow philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, as her `greatest achievement’. But it was the American writer Nelson Algren who was the great love of her life. They began a passionate affair just as she was embarking on her landmark feminist text, The Second Sex. In her letters, she tells of […]

Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week The Coen brothers – Joel and Ethan – made their first movie efforts on 8mm while they were kids, doing remakes of famous Hollywood movies they had seen. Eventually they did a pilot for a noir comedy-thriller, Blood Simple, and managed to gather enough money to film 30 minutes […]

Ann Eveleth Gauteng residents will have a “legal obligation” to care for their elderly parents, and could face fines of up to R50 000 or up to five years’ imprisonment if they are found to be “negligent”. This is one of the proposals of the Securing the Future for Gauteng’s Elderly Bill – one of […]