aRonald Bergen on the life and films of Stanley Kubrick, the enigmatic and reclusive director who died recently aged 70 Over his 40-year career, the director Stanley Kubrick made only 13 feature films, yet the scrupulous care with which he chose his subjects, his extremely slow method of working, the years of planning, the secrecy, […]
Mungo Soggot Several government schools are now offering students the chance to sit A level exams as confidence in South Africa’s matric qualification declines. State schools are joining the many private schools that have been providing courses for A levels for some time – usually for students planning to either study abroad or emigrate with […]
Michael Metelits The bad news is that your bank could hit a spot of trouble, run low on cash, find itself with too many people in line to draw funds, and collapse, leaving you with high blood pressure and a chequebook best used for gift-wrapping or reminder notes. Worse news would be that your bank […]
Patrick Johnson Howard Barrell (“Triumph of the politics of stupefaction”, February 19 to 25) raises a number of questions regarding the African National Congress’s national and provincial election lists, and the ordering of the lists as published earlier. It is interesting that of all the ANC ministers Barrell zoomed in on, he singled out those […]
Question: What do you do with a large brown tube-like object placed between your index finger and thumb? Answer: Don’t deny the experience ever took place – as United States President Bill Clinton did after he gave Monica Lweinsky a cigar to titillate herself with while he watched. That’s the official line from the 70-odd […]
Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week `Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.” So said award-winning playwright Tom Stoppard who, together with Marc Norman, penned the faultless script for Shakespeare in Love. If they don’t get an Oscar nod for […]
selection With the Western Stormers announcing a B team for their match down under this weekend, Andy Capostagno ponders how other sides will react Western Stormers coach Alan Solomons seems to be reinventing the traditional rules of the game on an almost daily basis. Last year, for instance, Solomons stopped releasing teams to the press […]
FOUR people were arrested on Thursday in Cape Town township Nyanga following a shootout between political rivals hours before a non-denominational church service designed to calm tension in the area, police said.Police spokesman Captain Mark Romburg said the shootout occurred in KTC, a shanty-town in the heart of Nyanga, where five political organisers have been […]
Simon Caulkin The corporate website was a novelty a couple of years ago. Now it is just another part of doing business. About 90% of the biggest European companies and almost all large American ones now have a presence on the World Wide Web, and the phenomenon is quickly embracing smaller firms. Setting up a […]
Neil Manthorp in Christchurch Cricket `It couldn’t have happened at a better time in my career. I grew up more in that week than I did in the rest of my life put together. If I hadn’t and I’d been the same person I was before then, I would never have survived, I just wouldn’t […]
The council’s closure of Mega Music is a severe blow to musicians and has left Johannesburg looking even more like a ghost town at night, writes Peter Makurube The Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council has finally unleashed the axe on Mega Music Trust, the body that runs Mega Music warehouse, an epicentre for musical happenings in […]
The introduction of six bull elephants seems to have sorted out the `aberrant behaviour’ of the young males in Pilanesberg, writes Barbara Ludman It was the sort of scene certain to delight visitors lucky enough to come upon it: a young bull elephant and two much younger males browsing peacefully together in the sparse bushveld, […]
Chris McGreal in Lagos Of all the mysteries surrounding the capture of the Lagos “man-eater”, the fate of the missing heads is the most disturbing. Clifford Orji was caught frying up human feet and ribs for breakfast under a city flyover. Severed hands lay about the place. There was even a policeman’s helmet resting on […]
Matthew Krouse Down the tube `No politicians behind desks and no talking heads,” promise the producers of Real Lives, e.tv’s new 13-part documentary series aired on Wednesdays at 9pm. The first two episodes, now shown, have indeed been free of laboured political invective and emotional commentary – proving what light relief a non-judgmental approach to […]
Kevin Mitchell backs Lennox Lewis in this weekend’s world heavyweight unification bout On Saturday night at Madison Square Garden in New York, two big men will slug it out for the biggest title on offer, the heavyweight champion of the world. One of them, Lennox Lewis, is certain to be as happy as anyone in […]
`We are trapped in a wilderness of mirrors,” James Jesus Angleton, the former head of counter- intelligence for the CIA, is quoted as having once said. Angleton was referring, of course, to the impossibility of finding one’s bearings in a professional world dedicated to bluff and counter-bluff, where nothing is what it appears to be. […]
Barbara Ludman MRS EINSTEIN by Anna McGrail (Anchor) A daughter was born to Mileva Maric and fellow student Albert Einstein a year before they were married. Baby Lieserl was given up for adoption in her mother’s village in southern Hungary so that the great man’s studies would not be disturbed. The two sons born after […]
Peter Sutton (Crossfire, March 5 to 11), in an article that relies on a book by Michael Denton, writes that “the theory propounded by Charles Darwin and his followers still remains to be proved conclusively”. Denton has led Sutton astray by criticising evolution without first troubling to understand the process. The article states that molecular […]
Ian Clayton Cash-strapped NGOs should not expect much assistance with their funding from the latest Katz commission report. The commission’s proposals on donations to and possible tax deductions from NGOs are to be printed soon – but they are unlikely to result in any major changes. Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel told Parliament this week […]
Review of the week Peter Makurube Five Guys Named Mo is a first rate musical set in Forties America – a story of love and friendship threaded around the music of jazz great Louis Jordan. The main theatre at The Market is the perfect venue for a show of this magnitude that has thrilled countless […]
Anthony Kunda Seven Zambian reporters were arrested this week after their newspaper published reports that the Zambian army did not have the capacity to withstand an attack by the Angolan army. The Post’s reporters Joe Kaunda and Kelvin Shimo were arrested on Tuesday night. Police later arrested Goodson Machona, Lubasi Katundu, Brighton Phiri, Amos Malupenga […]
GHANA, Morocco and Nigeria have applied to host the 2000 Nations Cup, the Confederation of African Football said on Friday. They will compete with original hosts Zimbabwe for the right to stage the 16-nation tournament from January 23 to February 13. The successful candidate will be named on Monday when CAF executives meet in Guinea. […]
SPARKED by crop damage fears, white maize futures reversed their upward sprint on Wednesday and turned back from the R1000-a-ton mark. A dealer said white maize futures reversed between R10 and R16 on five of the six contracts because of failed export orders for the staple grain. Traders are revising their estimates for the total […]
ANDRE MARKGRAAFF has picked two new caps for the Cats team to play the Sharks in a Super 12 rugby match at Ellis Park on Saturday night. Pieter O’Neill from South Western Districts and Riaan van Jaarsveld from Boland will be playing at flyhalf and centre respectively. In another backline change, Jorrie Kruger comes in […]
WORKERS at Zimbabwe’s Boka Tobacco Auction floor, which belongs to the late tycoon Roger Boka, have reportedly not been paid for two months. Several of the business empire’s bank accounts have also been compulsorily closed. Boka, once seen as the champion of black empowerment in Zimbabwe, died after a long illness last month. Workers are […]
Arthur Koestler raped novelist Jill Craigie. Now novelist Frederic Raphael says it was her own fault. Libby Brooks and Stephen Moss report Jill Craigie wraps her red wool-covered arms around the modern plastic kettle as it boils, to muffle or draw heat from it one isn’t quite sure. She eyes her garden through the long, […]
Ferial Haffajee The government has appointed a failed executive implicated in graft to head its state-of-the-art broadcasting school. Solly Kotane, a former African National Congress propagandist, was appointed in February despite his failures at Bop-TV and the South African Communications Service (Sacs). While at Sacs, he was called to Parliament to explain why a company […]
Last year I was invited to speak at the Oxford Union in my capacity as editor of the Erotic Review. I was also asked if I would like to stage an exhibition of erotic prints to give an extra frisson to the evening’s debate. I filled the august interior of the Gladstone room with explicit […]
BRITAIN on Thursday denied that five of its officials who were told to leave the Democratic Republic of the Congo are spies. London said the men had been working on contingency planning for a possible evacuation of its embassy in the capital, Kinshasa. “These people were not spies. Their purpose was wholly innocent and we […]
THE “Rose of Soweto”, former world boxing champion Dingaan Thobela, has narrowly escaped a ban after weighing in seven kilograms overweight for his welterweight bout against Argentina’s Adrian Daneff last Saturday. The bout was reduced from a title fight to an international contest and Thobela forfeited half his purse to his opponent. That penalty led […]
The consummate politician didn’t wear socks. Thabo Mbeki’s sockless feet was one of few down-home symbols as the new-look African National Congress leader made one of his first forays on the hustings last weekend. On a sodden Saturday afternoon in Soweto, Mbeki displayed the political colours he will wear on the election trail. Like being […]
Howard Barrell The African National Congress is pulling out all the stops to seize control of the government of the Western Cape from the New National Party in the election on June 2 – and it believes it has a good chance of succeeding. The ANC’s strategy depends on persuading upwards of six leading coloured […]