there is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
John Bercow, Unspeakable: The Autobiography (London:Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2020) THE FORMER Speaker of the House of Commons is often described as a Marmite figure. By that measure (in a frank declaration of reviewer interest) I […]
IN the 1980s, as a relatively young staff member on the Pietermaritzburg campus of the University of Natal, I had occasional encounters with the university vice-principal, Deneys Schreiner. I’ve recently read for pleasure and review […]
SOUTH Africa’s cricket ducks are no longer neatly in a row. Sooner or later there was bound to be a reckoning and the Black Lives Matter campaign has exposed a hidden rawness to the game […]
‘AMID mounting confusion over face masks inside takeaways, No 10 confirms once-and-for-all that masks are compulsory in the optional sense, unless you’re eating in, whereby they become optionally compulsory.’ (Have I Got News For You, […]
Philippa Garson, Undeniable: Memoir of a Covert War (Jacana, 2020) A CONSTANT presence in this book is the question of the third force. Was it, in the period leading up to South Africa’s first democratic […]
Steve Haake, Advantage Play: Technologies that Changed Sporting History (Arena Sport, 2018) PHYSICS and materials science meet sport in a book written with a strong dose of personal experience, a great deal of enthusiasm and […]
I UNDERSTAND that I don’t understand, but I stand (Black Lives Matter demo banner) On Saturday 13 June, early afternoon, I turned idly to Twitter to see what was going on ‘out there’ and began […]
‘HISTORICAL figures like Rhodes do not really matter much any more’. `Monuments [are] rather meaningless’.[1] Ten years after these words of Paul Maylam’s were published, high-profile protest at the University of Cape Town led to […]
EXACTLY how far is the University of Cape Town (UCT) prepared to go in genuflecting to populist thugs in the name of racial nationalism? Further and further, it seems, from the latest assault on academic […]
Sheffield AS lockdown got underway, with an understandable focus on physical wellbeing, attention also turned to emotional and psychological impact. Quite suddenly, routines were forced to change, ‘real’ social contact was only with those in […]