Pale Ghosts

Jeremy Harding

  • The Electronic Elephant: A Southern African Journey by Dan Jacobson
    Hamish Hamilton, 373 pp, £17.99, June 1994, ISBN 0 241 13355 6
  • Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela
    Little Brown, 630 pp, £20.00, November 1994, ISBN 0 316 90965 3
  • None to Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer
    Bloomsbury, 324 pp, £15.99, September 1994, ISBN 0 7475 1821 1
  • The Rift: The Exile Experience of South Africans by Hilda Bernstein
    Cape, 516 pp, £25.00, February 1994, ISBN 0 224 03546 0

Dan Jacobson grew up in the diamond town of Kimberley, South Africa. England was one of the places he looked to for inspiration. As it turned out, his interest in English literature and his habit of falling on copies of the New Statesman were ways of sending ahead. From his description of Kimberley on a Saturday afternoon in Time and Time Again (1985), it is obvious why he hankered for another life, the further away the better:

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