Lyndall Gordon
Unweaving the Rainbow Nation
No Time Like the Present
By Nadine Gordimer
Bloomsbury 432pp £18.99
Absolution
By Patrick Flanery
Atlantic Books 389pp £12.99
Nadine Gordimer’s great oeuvre of stories and novels has been suffused with the issue of racial injustice. Her Nobel prize was awarded in 1991, the year after Nelson Mandela was released from prison. The ‘rainbow nation’ was born when Mandela’s high-minded ANC party took office in 1994.
Eighteen years into the new South Africa, Gordimer puts her long support to the test. No Time Like the Present follows the rainbow lives of a group of one-time freedom fighters for whom moral choices were once simple. Their voices in the present draw us into moral disturbance: the bribes
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It wasn’t until 1825 that Pepys’s diary became available for the first time. How it was eventually decrypted and published is a story of subterfuge and duplicity.
Kate Loveman tells the tale.
Kate Loveman - Publishing Pepys
Kate Loveman: Publishing Pepys
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Arthur Christopher Benson was a pillar of the Edwardian establishment. He was supremely well connected. As his newly published diaries reveal, he was also riotously indiscreet.
Piers Brendon compares Benson’s journals to others from the 20th century.
Piers Brendon - Land of Dopes & Tories
Piers Brendon: Land of Dopes & Tories - The Benson Diaries: Selections from the Diary of Arthur Christopher Benson by Eamon Duffy & Ronald Hyam (edd)
literaryreview.co.uk
Of the siblings Gwen and Augustus John, it is Augustus who has commanded most attention from collectors and connoisseurs.
Was he really the finer artist, asks Tanya Harrod, or is it time Gwen emerged from her brother’s shadow?
Tanya Harrod - Cut from the Same Canvas
Tanya Harrod: Cut from the Same Canvas - Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell
literaryreview.co.uk