Nothing to fear but fear itself
WHEN we discuss the strengths and virtues of liberal democracy, that political philosophy now under siege in the United States, it is the permissive freedoms that spring to mind such as rule of and equality […]
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The Super Cadres: ANC Misrule in the Age of Deployment
Pieter du Toit, The Super Cadres: ANC Misrule in the Age of Deployment (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2024) STATE capture nearly bankrupted South Africa. Its mechanics and perpetrators were well documented by investigative journalists and then […]
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The power of a picture
IN the three-part drama Shooting the Past by the writer and director Stephen Poliakoff, the largely eccentric staff of a London photo archive of millions of items try to save their collection from destruction. The […]
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The Bams of Grasslands Farm: A Family History
Seán Morrow, The Bams of Grasslands Farm: A Family History (Johannesburg: Staging Post, 2024) WHAT might the course of South African history have been had the Christian African middle class of the nineteenth century been […]
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Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators who Want to Run the World
Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators who Want to Run the World (London: Allen Lane, 2024) DICTATORS and dictatorship are hardly new: they provided much of the darkness of the twentieth century, often in extreme […]
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The fascists are coming
THE AMERICAN people have not only elected a misogynist and convicted criminal as their 47th president, but a traitor. There can be no other conclusion. This is a man who incited violent insurrection by persistent […]
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Karla’s Choice: A John le Carré Novel
Nick Harkaway, Karla’s Choice: A John le Carré Novel (London: Penguin Viking, 2024) GEORGE Smiley, the anti-hero agent, appears in nine novels written by John le Carré who died in 2020. Smiley has a vast […]
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MKP’s first anniversary
ANGER stalks the world and seems evenly spread among the generations, although particularly prevalent among men as the crisis of masculinity grows. One would expect in this situation, whatever its genesis, that young charismatic leaders […]
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A new world order?
RHODA Kadalie was a well-known radical, anti-apartheid South African feminist who worked as an academic and journalist. Yet, for the last few years of her life she moved to the USA and became a Donald […]
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I Will Not Be Silenced
Karyn Maughan, I Will Not Be Silenced (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2024) BETWEEN 2023 and 2024, the international press freedom monitoring organisation Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) downgraded South Africa’s rating from 25 to 38 among 180 […]