Anthony Egan, SJ MICHAEL LAPSLEY – PRIEST AND PARTISAN: A SOUTH AFRICAN JOURNEY by Michael Worsnip (Ocean Press, R69,99) CONVENTIONAL boundaries between the genres of political and religious biography take something of a tumble in this generally excellent new book by theologian and church historian Michael Worsnip. His subject is Father Michael Lapsley, priest of […]

The controversial film Bad Lieutenant has had a belated release on circuit. ANDREW WORSDALE looks at the director’s career WHILE he was still in his teens Abel Ferrara, the director of Bad Lieutenant, started making films on Super 8. In the early Eighties he gravitated towards exploitation pictures with such legendary titles as Driller Killer […]

Thandi Lewin PROFESSOR Njabulo Ndebele is set to become the next vice-chancellor at the University of the Witwatersrand. As one of three on the shortlist, Ndebele has the support of many of the most powerful academics on campus, several of whom signed his nomination letter. Wits is a troubled campus, and the appointment of a […]

It’s a relief that Hansie Cronje’s hand injury isn’t serious because the South African team needs his inspirational leadership as they go into a tough season CRICKET:Jon Swift IT IS a tough enough task which faces the national cricket team this summer, and the news that skipper Hansie Cronje starts the international season less than […]

Playwright and poet, Maishe Maponya, is Johannesburg’s latest high power cultural appointment. He shares his ideas with HAZEL FRIEDMAN ‘I WAS called an angry young man, you know,” Maishe Maponya laughs gently at the recollection. With bene-volent smile and trademark scull cap framing his face like a tight-fitting halo, he looks positively papal in disposition […]

Jonathan Romney I Shot Andy Warhol was the opening film in the Un Certain Regard section. This makes perfect sense as its subject, Valerie Solanas, had a certain way of seeing the world, to say the very least, and the same is true of debut director Mary Harron. Solanas was the radical lesbian writer who […]

Marion Edmunds Parliament’s portfolio committees on tourism and environmental affairs have had MPs and senators reaching for their bikinis and sunhats. The committees are spending an estimated R300 000 on study tours abroad to Cuba, Jamaica and Bali. One of Gwen Mahlangu’s first tasks as Peter Mokaba’s replacement as chair of the National Assembly Portfolio […]

in The Mark Gevisser Profile Homeless ‘king of culture’ The depression that sets in, as I take a late- afternoon walk around the Newtown Cultural Precinct with Christopher Till, is not so much a result of the desolation that surrounds me as of the gap between this desolation and its creator’s vision of urban redemption. […]

Marion Edmunds Public Administration Minister Zola Skweyiya has had to bang heads together in the Presidential Review Commission — the body appointed by President Nelson Mandela to investigate transformation in the public service — to get it to do some work. Before this week, the multi-million rand commission met only four times since it was […]

MOTOR RACING: Alan Henry THE Mercedes baby has come of age. Heinz-Harald Frentzen has at last got the drive his ability deserves and has stolen a march on his bitter rival Michael Schumacher by getting it in the best car in Formula One, the Williams. The hiring of Frentzen represents a pre-emptive strike by the […]