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“... Sort of eight o’clockish, at a guess, we’re low on petrol, as estimated, and we’re near Kokstad, as calculated, and it is now time to pull in here at the police station, as arranged and appointed, and tank up this vehicle and sign for it all and move on to Durbs, where I will be purposefully locked up solo once again and the dangerous interim of transit from die Rooi Hel Boep in die Baai* will be safely over ...”

“... years ago the Cape Town publishing company David Philip brought out Way Up Way Out, a novel by Harold Strachan. Some time later I was sent a copy of the book by a friend of Strachan’s in KwaZulu-Natal, where the author himself has lived much of his life. His name on the cover meant nothing to me – though if I ...”

“... At first Dickens tried to deny that Harold Skimpole, the parasitical aesthete of Bleak House, had been based on his friend Leigh Hunt; but later he confessed, not a little proudly, that the character was ‘the most exact portrait that was ever painted in words . . . it is an absolute reproduction of a real man ...”

“... oldster, who clearly intends to die in the saddle. One and Last Love is dedicated to ‘Geoffrey Strachan, best of editors’. I wouldn’t mention this semi-private detail were it not for the fact that it doesn’t always strike one as the best-edited of novels. On page ten the lovers are discovered on a June afternoon: ‘the bed is king-sized, with a ...”