Jeremy Cronin: CROSSFIRE General Georg Meiring’s blunder in passing on to President Nelson Mandela a cock-and-bull story about a “left-wing” plot has got me thinking about Reserve Bank governor Chris Stals. What is the connection, you wonder? There have been persistent rumours about Stals’s role in the apartheid-era State Security Council. Little light has been […]

Tim Radford Nobody would give the novelist points for style. In the latest blockbuster to astonish the literary world, green is verdant, clock towers are ivy-covered and PhD diplomas are framed. But Betrayal could end up framed in a hall of fame, anyway. It was written by a new and powerful piece of software. Brutus.1 […]

Suzy Bell Woodstockian and music collector Dave Marks may be from the wild flower-child generation, but he’s no Durban Poison whingeing hippie. He’s the dynamic managing director of Third Ear Music and he has kept meticulous archives of live recorded music over the past 30 years. Now it is starting to be released through an […]

Ferial Haffajee The cocktail of a showbiz doyenne, an African princess and a struggle lawyer can only yield interesting results. This combination has seen African Media Entertainment (AME) cause quite a stir on the stock exchange and in the entertainment and film industries. From their offices at the MTN Sundome outside Johannesburg, David Dison (AME’s […]

Richard Williams: Movie of the week It has all the virtues of a classic British costume drama. A dead-on sense of period. Clothes so exquisite they make you want to go shopping. What a surprise, then, that we emerge from The Wings of the Dove thinking mostly about sex. Sex and Henry James? Hardly the […]

Despite facing stringent budget cuts, the military has paid out hefty merit bonuses – mainly to white officers, writes Mungo Soggot The Ministry of Defence is probing the armed forces’ decision to pay officers R77-million in performance bonuses, nearly all of which went to white officers of the former South African Defence Force (SADF). Amid […]

John Hooper in Rome The job of safeguarding cultural treasures, said Eugenio La Rocca, picking his words with exquisite care, “needs to be carried out without clamour, though we never intended to turn it into a clandestine activity”. There again, anyone might proceed with caution if he were admitting to the world that he had […]

On the World Day of the Book, April 23, readers, authors, publishers, librarians and booksellers all over the world will pay tribute to the most successful artefact ever invented -the book. This year, Exclusive Books is providing two opportunities for the public to participate in the book day act of giving. Firstly, you are invited […]

Who is . . . Vuka Tshabalala? Swapna Prabhakaran and Mungo Soggot Judges rarely open their mouths outside court. When they do, it is never about their cases. And it is almost never about themselves. It was therefore a surprising decision on the part of Judge Vuka Tshabalala to abandon the rule of silence outside […]

Andy Duffy The head of African studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT) has downed tools amid a racially charged dispute over the content of the university’s new foundation programme. Professor Mahmood Mamdani, director of the university’s Centre for African Studies, has withdrawn from the programme. A public seminar has been called on the […]