Julian Drew : Skiing Alex Heath, South Africa’s representative in Alpine skiing at the Winter Olympics starting on Saturday, is not your ordinary sort of guy. In November 1996 he suffered a fractured skull and brain haemorrhage that put him in a coma for 18 hours after a fall from the climbing wall in the […]

They may disagree on the methods, but the world’s financial gurus are unanimous that the forces of globalisation must be reined in, writes Larry Elliot Like a new car that unexpectedly develops life-threatening faults, the 1997 model of globalisation has been recalled by the makers. The havoc wreaked in the Far East by the crisis […]

Lesley Cowling : Material World Jetlag could be cured by shining a light behind your knees, say scientists who have discovered light-detecting equipment there. Experts in circadian rhythms, the daily nature cycles that cause flowers to open during the day, have found what they call “extraocular circadian phototransduction” behind the human knee. They tested 15 […]

Nicky Barker Induna Jonathan Buthelezi lives with a small community in the tribal lands of the Buthelezi next to the Ngome Forest in KwaZulu-Natal. The clan occupies a piece of land on two timber farms adjacent to the Sapekoe Tea Plantation, where they all work. The farms run steeply down a mountain, with 80ha of […]

Alex Clark The End of Alice by AM Homes (Anchor, R69,95) This novel, an everyday tale of paedophilia and child murder in middle-class America, is published in paperback plastered with the panegyrics of American critics, united mainly by their admiration for AM Homes’s horrifyingly “real” treatment of a taboo subject. At the same time, the […]

James Wood Underworld seems to me an achieved failure, of a kind any novelist might have been proud to produce. It is so often well- written, so punctually intelligent, so serious and ambitious, that it almost produces its own antibodies and makes criticism a small germ. One faults this novel warily, because DeLillo is an […]

Alex Brummer and Larry Elliott Radical changes in the operations of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank are to be proposed by finance ministers at a meeting in London later this month in response to the Asian crisis. The plans for adjusting the role of the IMF and the World Bank, to put […]

Nicole Turner For a generation of children opening their first savings accounts, the smell and feel of money will probably be obsolete by the time they take out their first housing loan. The term ”flipping a coin” will be a quaint reference to an era when people actually carried paper and metal currency in their […]

Afrikaner patriarchy gave men a ‘God-given’ right to abuse children as well as women and black people. Glynis O’Hara speaks to Diana Russell about her book on the subject You’re four years old, lying in bed dreaming about Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet, when suddenly you’re awakened by the hot breath and fumblings of your father. Or […]