Adam Mars-Jones FREEDOM SONG by Amit Chaudhuri (Picador) Amit Chaudhuri’s writing comes as a mild therapeutic shock to those who visualise India as either benightedly rural or bustlingly urban: his characters may live in Calcutta, but they live at a private angle to their city. The cast of Freedom Song is large and tenuously related. […]

This could be one of those rare concerts that goes down in history like the Amnesty International Concert in Harare in 1988. So if you’ve got some wheels and you’re in need of a restorative African musical adventure, then put that cabbie into first and head for lush Mpumalanga. About 30 minutes past Nelspruit off […]

Poor West African fishermen, prevented by an international treaty from fishing off their own shores, are forced to buy their own sardines in European cans, reports Paul Brown Mauritanian fishermen sit in the harbour gazing out to sea. In the distance, where Africa bulges out into the Atlantic, they watch sunlight glinting off other men’s […]

Chiara Carter The heat is being turned on alleged Mafia boss Vito Palazzolo, with moves to step up a police investigation and another extradition request expected from the Italian authorities. Palazzolo, who became a South African citizen in 1995, is on trial in absentia in Italy and was recently listed as a top Mafia figure […]

bark The silence surrounding last week’s appointments by the Judicial Services Commission is deafening. The Bench and academia are seething with indignation over the appointments of the two judges president and one deputy. Yet there is not a bleat of public protest other than the resignation of Judge Piet van der Walt from the Office […]

For Olympic marathon-winner Josiah Thugwane, who will be competing in the prestigious New York Marathon next weekend, it’s been a long, hard road to success. Gavin Evans reports When Josiah Thugwane talks of his life’s greatest achievements, he glosses over his Olympic marathon gold medal and a string of other running records and settles on […]

CD of the week: Shaun de Waal Bob Dylan sure started something when he allowed previously unreleased material and outtakes to be released as The Bootleg Series in 1991. The huge success of that collection encouraged the likes of The Beatles, who, once they’d finally wound up their legal wranglings, released all their leftover bits […]

He’s the eternal optimist, the affable family man who happens to be a sex-god superstar. Yet still he doesn’t feel loved. He spoke to Miranda Sawyer Ewan McGregor is one of the most extraordinary people you could ever meet; but what is startling about him is his delightful, dumbfounding ordinariness. His freakish normality. Richard E […]

Evidence wa ka Ngobeni Tzaneen farm workers Jonas Maluleke (26) and Daniel Sono (28) have been waiting behind bars for a year to get their day in court in the Northern Province. Since they first appeared in court in October 1997, their trial on charges of rape and assault of a 25-year-old woman has been […]

Keith Devlin For about R5-million you can buy the earliest known account of the idea that inspired Archimedes to run naked down the street shouting “Eureka”. On October 29, Christie’s New York auction house will sell the manuscript that is the only source for Archimedes’s treatise, On the Method of Mechanical Theorems, and the only […]