“... His unease with what was expected of ‘committed’ writers in late apartheid South Africa caused Nadine Gordimer to speak of his work’s ‘stately fastidiousness’, and it was plain long before Disgrace (1999) that he felt no duty of optimism towards the democratised state. Outside South Africa, meanwhile, his media non-appearances were received as ...”

“... Waguih Ghali’s novel about a group of doomed cosmopolitan Cairenes in the early Nasser years. As Nadine Gordimer put it, Said had finally written his novel.But he wasn’t ready to elegise the Palestinian cause, even if he had cut his ties to the leadership. Palestine was a symbol of justice denied and freedom to come, rather than a piece of bitterly ...”

“... mind can become a closed circuit. In March 2004, Sontag travelled to South Africa at the behest of Nadine Gordimer. ‘Gordimer wanted to take her to a game reserve,’ Moser reports, ‘but Susan proclaimed that she was not interested in nature.’ In this Sontag had been foolishly, conceitedly consistent all her ...”

“... I suppose it would have been possible to write, a white woman living in Africa (as it was for Nadine Gordimer), nearer to her two first children, but it would have meant giving up a world of experience denied to her in postwar Salisbury (not having rid itself of apartheid), with its frozen middle-class attitudes to women – what they could do, and ...”

“... and aesthetic gulf, separated the two women. But incongruous as it sounds – a bit like imagining Nadine Gordimer clubbing, say, with Lindsay Lohan – it’s a pretty good bet that Woolf would have seen Bernhardt on stage. Unless I’ve missed it, none of the Woolf biographers reports such an encounter, but Woolf would have had dozens, if not ...”