The winner in Exclusive Books’ promotion, the Boeke Prize, was announced this week. Critics vote on the best of six books chosen by booksellers. The ranking of the books from first to last is: Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (Sceptre); The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (Flamingo); Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur […]
These days, the Market Theatre management claims, people book tickets because they want to and not out of some obligation to the place that, once upon a time, changed South African culture. If you pop into the theatre now you’ll find a video monitor fixed to one of those pillars laden with brass plaques. The […]
Julie Burchill: FIRST PERSON In the heyday of the Hollywood studio system, Louis B Mayer, head of MGM (More Stars Than There Are in the Heavens), kept a very strange chart on his wall. The chart kept a record of the menstrual cycles of the studio’s leading ladies: Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, Grace Kelly. By […]
Andrew Marr ENGLAND, ENGLAND by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape) That England has become a theme-park nation is a chattering-class clich. It is also at least partly true. There is no English crisis, but there is a problem. In England, everything becomes a tradition, and that includes the confection of tradition. But the quantity of contemporary […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Accra | Friday 7.30pm. GHANA’S First Lady, Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings, has denied allegations in an Accra circuit court that she has a bank account worth $18-million in Switzerland. Defence counsel Akoto Ampaw was cross-examining Rawlings in a case in which Eben Quarcoo, former editor of the Free Press and Tommy Thompson Books […]
Maureen Barnes Down the tube Until last Sunday, my acquaintance with e.tv was through the newspaper schedules. Friends, either new or old, while immensely popular with the young and hopeful, was not worth turning back the clock for, nor was early Oprah, and as with M-Net, if the movie was good – and some were […]
Howard Barrell South Africa is on the verge of postponing its biggest-ever joint military and police exercise with other countries in the region, scheduled for next month, because of problems caused by the incursion into Lesotho. The South African National Defence Force (SANDF)has told other interested government departments it doubts it can afford the exercise, […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Friday 10.30am. BJORN BORG on Thursday annihilated Argentinian veteran Guillermo Vilas to proceed to the semifinals of the MTN Champions Tournament, being played at the University of Pretoria indoor arena. Borg (42), who held his world number-one ranking for an incredible 109 weeks in his prime, outplayed Vilas in all departments […]
to die Zanemvula (Zakes) Mda has happy memories of growing up among a community of South African exiles and Lesotho locals in the small town of Mafeteng. Last week he returned to find a smouldering ruin Chris Hani used to frequent this restaurant. His father, known to us only as Ntate Hani, owned it in […]
Chiara Carter Nomaindia Mfeketo, the new mayor of Cape Town, tackles the social side of her work with zest because she wants to make sure every function she hosts tackles the city’s “apartheid divisions”. Mfeketo, who became mayor last week, acknowledges the criticism often levelled at Cape Town: that little has changed since 1994 and […]