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“... at some speed. His speech follows hard on a truce agreement between the ANC and Inkatha – the first step towards ending a conflict which has cost some five thousand lives in Natal and on the Reef since 1985. Whether the truce will hold and whether it will stem the creeping ethnicisation of black politics remains to be seen. But Mandela’s public embrace ...”

“... his body was carried on an army gun carriage through Soweto in post-apartheid South Africa’s first state funeral. Forty thousand people sat through the long tributes in Orlando Stadium, the ANC high-ups arriving in Nyala armoured cars. Impala jets – developed by sanctions-struck South Africa to fight the likes of Slovo – flew overhead in ...”

“... Writing of​ Ruth Asawa’s first solo exhibition in New York in 1954, the critic Parker Tyler described her sculptures as inviting the viewer ‘to be as still as they are or to tremble when they tremble’. He was responding to what had become her signature works: biomorphic forms woven from industrial wire, hung from the ceiling like lanterns ...”

“... a woman writing from remote farms and railway stoppings in South Africa between the 1870s and the First World War attract this attention? The new Olive Schreiner has been commissioned with the renewed interest in the feminist heroine of The Story of an African Farm (1883), and this approach to Olive Schreiner, which places her as a polemicist rather than a ...”

“... ceased to love the ruined father. Left homeless, she was taken in by her eldest brother, Theo, who first ran a school, then went to try his luck in the diamond fields. When Olive was five she sat among the tall weeds behind the house and understood, without having the words for it, that they were alive and that she was part of them. At six, she was whipped for ...”

“... Ruth and Lucille are sisters, living in Fingerbone on Fingerbone Lake. At the bottom of the lake lies their grandfather, who was guard on a train that plunged off the bridge one night, years before they were born. There also lies their mother, who one day when Ruth was eight years old drove in from Seattle, left the children on their grandmother’s porch, and then went on in the car to the top of a tall cliff and drove off into the blackest depths of the water ...”

“... Africa, ‘whether this is a dead-end or can be made a new beginning.’ Get a Life is not the first of Gordimer’s writings in which power plants are the political focus. In her 1984 novella, ‘Something Out There’, four ANC revolutionaries conduct a successful strike against a power station (the episode is based on a real event). Although Gordimer ...”

“... trees like these in England which she never saw – and now, trees in my garden make me feel the first true pang of grief since her death. Between the wash-tubs and storecupboards filled with pickled peaches and grape-jam, crouched into a broken wicker chair, I peered up through the basement window. Sketchpad on my lap, with brushes and bottles of black ...”

“... A ladder’, the master whispered, ‘of nucleic acid.’ This was the first we’d heard of it. Rain nosed the glass; wind lashed the trees outside. ‘Four hydrogen-bonded nucleotides locking on like mating damselflies, but each a different size, pulling the ladder’s sides into a twist, like serpents on the sign outside a chemist who for old time’s sake gives lodging in his window to the alchemist’s glass jars ...”

“... jade-green canal, chin upside down under the scum of the sodden log edge, slicks her hair for her first job, her first fashion shoot. She thinks she’s alone. They’re russeting up into amber and rose. Blue eyes have turned citrus. Brown ears (little triangles, no longer round) hear her ring- tune: Dr Zhivago. She ...”

“... sad’). The thud of lilies that could only be the thud of lilies, nothing else – or the first shot of Dr Zhivago. The mound of pinkish clay against those tungsten hills, and two hefty men walking away from it, back to HQ after a good half-day, swinging from post-sacramental torsos the straps that lowered you. V But Gerry, the way you held ...”

“... Picardie’s fashion memoir centres on the story of a dead sibling, in her case, a dead sister, Ruth. Ruth, as many readers will already know, was, like her sister, a writer and journalist on the fluffier end of London newspapers and magazines. She wrote about babies (she had infant twins), face creams, new clothes from ...”

“... secrets in black earth on ivy-lattice ridge-trails; wolf-shadows where cedars flush in dawn’s first light under first winter snow. You’ve betrayed all this to our enemies, the Greeks. (Euripides, Trojan Women, 1060-70) I was on his boat. As we left we saw a deranged old man, a fire-eater. Our shorn hills behind the ...”

“... Versions of Alligator Creation She made the world’s first alligator from a spine    Of sugar-cane, Binding the spring growth’s joints and knuckles,    Then rind-peelings, The eyes from saffron, tail from the leaves and fruit    Of betel-nut, Clay mould from a sheet of upish,    Squelching from sheaths Of betel-nut palm: and prayed    It might have life ...”

“... small waters of our particular rivers, and this terrible readiness to worry about your own family first, may be the least of our problems but I think my daughter, my daughter, how is she going to deal with ...”