Shirley Kossick THERE has been a bumper crop of women’s writing this year, both in fiction and biography. Pride of place must go to Pat Barker, whose novel The Ghost Road (Viking) swept in to win the Booker Prize ahead of Salman Rushdie’s favoured The Moor’s Last Sigh The final volume in Barker’s trilogy about […]

1 Black Grape: It’s Great When You’re Straight … Yeah! (BMG) 2 Pulp: Different Class (Polygram) 3 James Phillips: Made in South Africa (Shifty/Tic Tic Bang) 4 Neil Young with Pearl Jam: Mirror Ball (Warner Bros) 5 Urban Creep: Sea Level (Shifty/Tic Tic Bang) 6 Boukman Eksperyans: Libte (Pran Pou Pran’l!) (Mango) 7 Gito Baloi: […]

RUGBY: Barney Spender=20 AFTER a noisy, boisterous Saturday night to celebrate a=20 Welsh victory over Japan, the Hard Rock Cafe in=20 Bloemfontein was a ghost pub on Sunday at lunchtime.=20 Michelle, a bubbly waitress, who had seen the tips over the=20 previous 10 days rise quicker than a Kobus Wiese line-out=20 lift, cut a forlorn […]

Let’s look a gift horse in the mouth, Reg Rumney suggests Promotional material the Mail & Guardian staffers received this year ranged from the sublime — a useful desktop calculator — to the ridiculous: that is, the grey concrete brick that arrived at reception for me. At first I thought it a veiled threat, but […]

CLASSICAL CD OF THE YEAR: Andrew Clements GURRELIEDER was Schoenberg’s farewell to 19th- century romanticism, the “key to his development”, as he described it. It was begun in 1901 but was only performed 12 years later, by which time he had left the lush Wagnerian world that it celebrates far behind. The massive proportions of […]

SOCCER: Gerald Combrink THE Coca Cola Cup has since its inception in 1992 become the property of the minnows of South African soccer. It is a competition that, like the sponsor’s logo, seems to “add life” to the lesser knowns of the local game. In fact, the only giant to do anything significant in the […]

‘You need to know what they are feeding on and how they=20 are behaving, then decide on a strategy.’ This is=20 Cyril Ramaphosa speaking not about his tactics in=20 parliament, but about one of his greatest passions:=20 trout fishing. Lesley Cowling reports There is an urban legend which gives the trout a broker’s=20 role in […]

Fred de Vries=20 EDUCATION, information and entertainment: that’s what South=20 Africa’s first music industry exhibition, Samix ’95, is=20 about If you’re not interested in the workshops and the=20 equipment, you can still come along and have fun listening=20 to the music, says Samix director Karl Heinz Lang.=20 An industry effort to develop music in the […]

Moveable Feast Humphrey Tyler THERE just has to be a rather special atmosphere about a really good curry restaurant. No, no — not sleazy. But often fairly ordinary chairs, for example, and generally inexpensive tables. Like the sort you find in cafes. Hopefully you will also see determined women in saris striding out of the […]