Andy Colquhoun If a camel is a horse designed by a committee then a Rugby World Cup designed by the International Rugby Board (IRB) is quite clearly a camel’s derrire. What a dreadful, wasted opportunity this rambling, shambling, stumblebum of a tournament is turning out to be. Saturday marks the end of the pool stage […]

Eddie Butler Rugby World Cup The round-figure mathematics of fame. It is easy to call John Eales the best player of the Nineties because his career fits so neatly into this decade. He obviously has better icon value than, say, David Campese because Campo straddled the Eighties and the Nineties. So untidy. Besides, Campo was […]

precedent Stefaans Brmmer The Pretoria High Court decision this week to scrap six charges against apartheid’s “Dr Death”, Wouter Basson, may set a legal precedent allowing similar killers to walk free. The court ruled Basson cannot be prosecuted for poison murders committed abroad. One of the first judicial casualties may be efforts by the National […]

Shaun de Waal Movie of the week If you haven’t yet tired of movies populated by American teenagers of varying degrees of sophistication, you will find writer- director Alexander Payne’s Election a superbly sardonic entertainment. It is a satire about democracy. How odd that sounds: who would want to satirise democracy? But democracy does not […]

be over Telford Vice Cricket Not another bloody perfect day, we might have thought, as we sank almost without trace into the cane chairs scattered around the pool bar at Nairobi’s Stanley Hotel. Except that the sky over South African cricket was far from an uncluttered Kenyan blue, despite the triumphant holding aloft of the […]

Dramatic Encounters series supervising producer Mickey Madoda Dube takes umbrage at Andrew Worsdale’s negative review I was greatly disappointed in Andrew Worsdale’s review of Dramatic Encounters on September 10. Far from professional, it was more about what Andrew would have wanted to see than what the films actually presented. Surely a professional reviewer should look […]

Alex Dodd In a massive departure from Eighties- style puritanism, the Nineties, or rather millennial, means of art promotion is all about unabashed mutual co-operation between the arts and business: you scratch my back, I’ll decorate your boardroom. Hardly new really. Caravaggio was having it off with the Catholic bishops in exchange for oil paints […]

Scriptwriter and creator of sci-fi TV series First Wave, Chris Brancato, tells Katy Bauer how to hurtle across Hollywood potholes without getting whiplash or becoming a jerk Writers? They’re a pain in the arse. They hover between chronic insecurity, bar- room brawls and delusions of grandeur. Hardly surprising really. The vast majority do exist in […]

Mail & Guardian reporter A brother-in-law of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe is under investigation after he allegedly sexually assaulted a teenage girl at his home in Ottawa, Canada, last week. Police were called to the home of Simbarashe Reward Marufu, a second-ranking diplomat at the Zimbabwean high commission in Canada, on October 5. They summoned […]