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“... Nelson Mandela, incarcerated for over a quarter of a century, writes frequently to his wife, Winnie, about his vivid and often rather frightening dreams.   I dreamt I was with the young men of the kraal. They gave me herbs to strengthen me against you. They were saying that I should fight with you so that you would run away ...”

“... mesmerising’ – a combination far more difficult to achieve than it sounds. Many years later, Nelson Mandela, always precise in his choice of words, described Kentridge’s courtroom manner as ‘understated, controlled and relentlessly rational’.Having made an early mark as junior counsel for the trade union leader Solly Sachs (Albie Sachs’s ...”

“... and the surely imminent end of apartheid. Lafont stood up and asked: ‘Do you want to see Winnie Mandela?’ I couldn’t think at that moment of anything I wanted more.We walked to a large house nearby, entering through the basement. A group of young men were drinking and smoking. They nodded us through, and we made our way to a TV room where a slasher ...”

“... where Future World undoubtedly cut his first tooth, a fortnight later we also saw that photo of Nelson Mandela and him together – the first photo of Mandela in 27 years. They were like two propped-up grandfathers, both smiling awkwardly at the camera. They were disposed as if we were to make a simple choice. Or was ...”

“... Nelson Mandela was released from prison on 2 February 1990. On 26 February F.W. de Klerk ordered the dismantling of a South African nuclear weapons programme which very few people knew existed. At the time the country had six uranium bombs and one more under construction. De Klerk had looked into abandoning the programme a year earlier, but Mandela’s release was plainly instrumental in making it happen ...”

“... the Boer War is still going on, just as it always has, and that even the arrival in power of Nelson Mandela has not disturbed their way of thinking. A little later, van Tonder applauded the Government’s decision to remove the names of Afrikaner Nationalist premiers from all the country’s airports. Johannesburg and Durban airports should ...”

“... collided head-on with an Afrikaner nationalism still at its muscular zenith. The result was that Nelson Mandela and seven of his co-defendants were sent to jail for life – between 22 and 27 years, as it turned out. Much about the trial was grossly unfair. It was held in Pretoria, the citadel of virulently anti-black nationalism, to make sure that ANC ...”

“... Progressive​ intellectuals in South Africa, when asked what they think of Winnie Mandela, most often respond: it’s a complex story. Complexity is sometimes an excuse for avoiding a principled judgment, an uncomfortable truth. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was a victim and a perpetrator of violence ...”

“... At an enormous ‘peace’ rally in Durban at the end of February Nelson Mandela called upon the warring Inkatha and UDF factions to ‘throw your arms into the sea’, an appeal which met with considerable applause. Perhaps the loudest ovation of all, however, came when Mandela announced, at the meeting’s end, that he had ‘a wonderful present’ to offer the crowd – ‘the mother of the nation ...”

“... wars’ in Angola and Mozambique. As we have been told time and again since he died on 5 December, Nelson Mandela was instrumental to the political bargain that proposed forgiveness in the hope of a better future. Whatever we think of South Africa now, we still contemplate with horror the abyss into which it was widely expected to plunge twenty years ...”

“... hold and whether it will stem the creeping ethnicisation of black politics remains to be seen. But Mandela’s public embrace of Buthelezi has inaugurated a new and intense phase of politicking within and between the two organisations. With Inkatha now poised to play a major role alongside the ANC in the negotiations for a new constitution, it will in any case ...”

“... one gathers, has been celebrated in the new South Africa with a certain diffidence. What could Nelson Mandela or his successor really contribute to the occasion? The English South Africans had been triumphant for a time, and had the wit to extend the hand of friendship to their enemies in the Union of 1910. The Boers took revenge in 1948 and we all ...”

“... truth I was always one of them. I am a white man born in Africa and all else flows from there.’ Nelson Mandela is free. F. W. de Klerk declares the end of apartheid and the dawn of democracy. Has this book been overtaken? Does it still have relevance in this new age? Can it be helpful to go into these matters again? Or rather, has there ever been a ...”

“... entails a little more gracefully. In the Eighties, long since divorced, I decided that marriage to Nelson Mandela (or Terry Waite) would have suited me fine. When The Female Eunuch came out in 1970 the man I was married to bought me a copy (clearly he can’t have been the cause of all my troubles). But it was the same with the book as it had been with ...”

“... of the real South Africa, not just of its fictional representation in the pages of A Land Apart, Nelson Mandela would be prime minister before the year was out.In the Afrikaans section, the narrator of Elsie Joubert’s story, ‘Back Yard’, says: ‘I live on the periphery of an existence which I don’t understand.’ She meditates upon the fact ...”