Andy Capostagno Rugby With The Truman Show about to overrun our cinemas there will be those who look upon the final weekend of log fixtures in the Currie Cup as another example of media manipulation. Griquas play the Falcons, Western Province play Natal and the Blue Bulls play Free State. In terms of log positions, […]

Patrick Bond Share World `It is interesting that at times like this Mr [John Maynard] Keynes is again resurrected,” remarked South African Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel at the meeting with his Commonwealth counterparts in Ottawa at the end of last month. “There is a recognition that the standard prescription for macroeconomic stability and growth […]

WL Webb ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN: A CENTURY IN HIS LIFE by DM Thomas (Little, Brown) Somewhere in her great biography of her murdered poet-husband, Nadezhda Mandelstam quotes a 19th-century sage to the effect that “Russia exists to teach the rest of the world a lesson”. Whatever Freudian glosses one adds to his motivation, there is no […]

Mandy Collins For those of us without children, the last time school fees figured in our lives was when our parents gave us a small brown envelope for the school secretary, while they grumbled that R20 a term was akin to extortion. Well, times have changed, and if you’re considering parenthood, or have just had […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Harare | Friday 4.15pm. THE Zimbabwe Tourism Authority, a parastatal meant to boost the country’s international tourist business, is to confront President Robert Mugabe on his tendency to commandeer state-owned Air Zimbabwe aircraft at short notice, leaving passengers stranded. A number of industry players, including the Zimbabwe Tourism Authority and the Zimbabwe Tourism […]

Michael Metelits I admit it. I was a yuppie during the 1980s. Not just any kind of yuppie, either. I was the trade settlement operations manager for a small, but nonetheless venal, investment management firm in Boston. I sat on the trading floor and witnessed a great deal of what the Eighties had to offer. […]

spring fever Friday night Genevieve Cutts Remember the days when it was a mission to find something to do on a weekend in Johannesburg? Well, those days are over. My Fridays now begin (please note I say begin) vegged out on my couch in front of the TV as I am e-ntertained and e-nthralled by […]

Cocaine, whisky, grass, Dunhills, whisky, cocaine… Staying up all night with the bad boy of US literature is a trial. Marianne Macdonald lived to tell the tale Hunter S Thompson’s big things have always been raising hell and taking drugs, and though he is now 61, neither hell nor ill-health will stop him. He holes […]

Anew TV documentary seeks out the person behind the `freak’ Sara Baartman, writes Alex Dodd `Can you imagine? You’ve become a rented spectacle. You’re owned by a guy who sells you to an animal trainer who then hires you out to scientists. And you return home to stay with his animals. There’s probably a trained […]

Rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo scored an important victory this week in capturing the town of Kindu, which Laurent Kabila’s government was trying to use as the launch pad for a counter-offensive against the rebels. But the victory merely underlines why that long-suffering nation cannot afford a military solution to its problems. What […]