Litnet

"But crossing the Rubicon, as always, carries risks. PW Botha lasted a few years more, Julius Caesar had his Ides of March moment not long after – and Xi Jinping?"

"The bottom line of Ramaphosa’s state visit to King Charles and new prime minister Rishi Sunak is that adroit footwork is now required by all parties to mitigate the effects of the global polycrisis, defined by historian Adam Tooze as a situation consisting of multiple crises, the whole being more dangerous than the sum of the parts. The danger is the deep global recession now taking shape ...."

"How, one might ask in disbelief, could one of the most civilised countries in the west, the cradle of the Renaissance, throw in its lot with such a dangerous man as Putin? It is almost impossible to imagine such a thing. But that is the question being asked now, and the answer to Italy's future must surely lie in the character and beliefs of the new prime minister."

"I was interested to read that several ANC Youth League officials have flown to Russia to monitor the controversial referendum being held to legitimise the 'annexation' of the Ukrainian territory that Putin’s army is occupying. The referendum has been discredited in advance by most of the world as a sham, but this hasn’t deterred the ANC’s intrepid task team from acting as 'international observers'."

"The Polish government commemorates the sacrifice of the SAAF airmen in their attempt to relieve Warsaw, to this day. Next year is the eightieth anniversary of the doomed Warsaw mission, and it will be interesting to see how the occasion is marked by the present South African government."

"All wars in history, from the Greek heroes onwards, spawn such intense memoirs, long and short. They are a bedrock of classic literature. We are fascinated by them. They invite us to eavesdrop on the confessional. They are a form of writing therapy, a way of laying the ghost, and a psychiatrist is not needed to tell us that. But there is also more to it. War memoirs involve all of us, including the bystanders. They make the reader complicit."

"This brings me to the strange case of Sisulu and Socrates, who have become unlikely bedfellows in this fight to speak your mind, albeit from diametrically opposed corners."

"So, what went wrong? A number of unfortunate coincidences, probably. Most notably, being a man whose reputation as a true libertarian in the John Stuart Mill mould was established, he himself fell foul of too much libertarianism when it entered the sphere of his own life, which, when he became prime minister, made his private behaviour a public spectacle."

"Painful choices had to be made, if Meyer was to save both his house and his delicate wife from the privations of the crowded concentration camps, rife with disease and primitive sanitation. In Meyer’s view, the war was taking too brutal a toll, and would be lost in any event. Honourable surrender was the best way forward."

"The island, created at the height of apartheid repression, is a remarkable play for various reasons. In order to sidestep the authorities, it was workshopped but not initially scripted; it has no single author, and when a script did finally emerge, it provided actors with sufficient latitude as to re-interpret the play’s core messaging in subsequent productions, notably in the 1980s and 1990s."

"Shakespeare always moved with the times; he would certainly have added that music is the food of politics, not only love, judging from contemporary events."

"On the same day Moscow’s chief propagandist warned that Russia had the capacity to ignite a 'Poseidon' underwater nuke capable of submerging Britain with a giant radioactive tsunami, I listened to Freek Robinson on LitNet interviewing Theo Venter on the likelihood of President Putin actually using an atomic bomb."

"Dianne Stewart’s stories are effective because they, too, are rooted in the modern everyday experience of ordinary people with whom we can identify. We cannot predict their ending in most cases, because they are often left open-ended, but it is our imaginations that supply the denouement, depending on which door we open – it puts the reader in the position of being an arbiter of fate."

"But meanwhile, when Viktor was pressed to describe the essential difference between the bilingual Ukrainians and Russians, essentially speaking one another's language, he said the nearest analogy was that of Ireland and England."

"Kleynhans researched Hitler’s spies for his PhD thesis, and, as might be expected, he has included a superb bibliography, which will keep serious students of the Second World War history of South Africa reading for years to come."