Cocaine, whisky, grass, Dunhills, whisky, cocaine… Staying up all night with the bad boy of US literature is a trial. Marianne Macdonald lived to tell the tale Hunter S Thompson’s big things have always been raising hell and taking drugs, and though he is now 61, neither hell nor ill-health will stop him. He holes […]

indifference Mark Atkinson in Washington When Asian currencies collapsed last year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank came to the rescue with multi-billion-dollar bail- outs. Since 1985, when Tanzania began implementing its IMF structural adjustment programme, the local currency, the shilling, has devalued by 1 500%, yet the country will not qualify […]

l The Nobel Prize in Physics: Professor Robert S Laughlin, Stanford University; Professor Horst L Strmer, Columbia University; and Professor C Tsui, Princeton University for discovering that electrons acting together in strong magnetic fields can form new types of “particles”, with charges that are fractions of electron charges. l The Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Walter […]

As the Nobel Prize brings attention to Portuguese literature, Stephen Gray looks at a poet with a South African connection Ten years ago in these pages, Carmel Rickard reported from downtown Durban on the unveiling of a plaque in honour of the centenary of Fernando Pessoa’s birth. This, in turn, was at the foot of […]

Andy Capostagno Rugby With The Truman Show about to overrun our cinemas there will be those who look upon the final weekend of log fixtures in the Currie Cup as another example of media manipulation. Griquas play the Falcons, Western Province play Natal and the Blue Bulls play Free State. In terms of log positions, […]

Loose cannon: Robert Kirby Sometimes journalists actually do get that whopping Sisyphean boulder to the top of the hill. It takes a great deal of heaving and huffing, but eventually down it tumbles, taking the Emmanuel Shaws, the Jesse Duartes with it. It needed literally dozens of press, radio and television boulders to coax, motivate, […]

With the approach of Nelson Mandela’s retirement commentators will soon be offering their epitaphs on the political career of a president who will no doubt be long remembered as South Africa’s greatest leader.

retrenchments Evidence wa ka Ngobeni Final examinations at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) hang in the balance this year following ongoing unrest on the campus. Examinations have been postponed for two weeks, but the administration has not yet set a date for them to begin. In an extraordinary move, UWC’s senate has censured […]

Review of the week Brenda Atkinson There are several possible responses to turn-of-the-century ennui, most of which involve an element of exhausted backlash and sudden nostalgia for other, better times and simpler cultural manifestations. I, for one, am aware of a growing yearning for time-honoured and outdated rituals like thought, beauty and big-band ballroom dancing. […]

battleground On October 23 1942, the battle of El Alamein began. James Ambrose Brown, a young soldier, carried into battle a diary in which he recorded the horror of all he saw This year there will be no old soldiers at the graves of comrades who died at the battle of El Alamein. Like those […]