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“... but chary review of The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) in the New York Review of Books, Nadine Gordimer wrote about J.M. Coetzee’s ‘conscious choice’ of allegory as a literary mode in his first three novels. The reasons for this, she speculated, were temperamental: It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself ...”

“... plough through these three bodice-rippers from Rudland and Stubbs, but call in Anita Brookner or Nadine Gordimer? No, no, we won’t do that, even if they have won the prize before. More than an abnegation of responsibility, this displayed a singular lack of curiosity. And while the judges annually complain about the great burden of reading placed upon ...”

“... is unnecessarily defensive. There was much sense in her views, even if they were not those held by Nadine Gordimer. When she first lived in South Africa, she was naive. Later, perhaps, she was desolated. Her best novels are written with a kind of appalled pity for the human condition; but in her last book, Funeral Games, there is simply a dry-eyed ...”

“... Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Rebecca West, P.L. Travers, Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Bishop, Nadine Gordimer and Anne Sexton, who appear in the volume alongside the writers already mentioned – is that they are not men, which is not as tautological a proposition as it looks. Being a woman writer is only partly a matter of how any writing woman ...”

“... rare for the apartheid state to try and oblige any of its non-white minorities in this way, but as Nadine Gordimer pointed out, the Islamic leadership does agree to sit in the phoney ‘Chamber’ that is reserved for those who are not quite white and yet not African. I suppose John Berger might find something colonial in Ms ...”

“... door locked and the curtains drawn, eating pilchards from the tin while reading Saul Bellow and Nadine Gordimer, restocking addictively on books at a second-hand bookshop. Although his degree is a dead end, he finds his stay in South Africa, in the aftermath of apartheid, liberating. Throughout the book the political context is handled ...”

“... That has always been my greatest regret, and the most painful aspect of the choice I made.’ Nadine Gordimer’s novel is set in the period after Mandela’s release. It is about homecoming and transition. The heroine, Vera Stark, who works for a progressive legal foundation, is not an exile as such, but she has lived at a distance from ...”

“... to as ‘the Trinidadian novelist’. This might place him with such non-British writers as Nadine Gordimer and Patrick White, but he is later included in Bradbury’s alphabetical checklist of British novelists since 1876. It looks as if an adverse judgment has been passed by default. It is not that Bradbury shies away from evaluative ...”

“... duck the issue? Most English-language prose writers in South Africa, from Olive Schreiner through Nadine Gordimer and André Brink to Mongane Serote, have tried to reconcile these conflicting claims, the claims of history and fiction, by writing in the realist mode. When Coetzee began to write, in the Seventies, he was one of the first South African ...”

“... and even impede ‘the cultural struggle’, so pressure was suddenly exerted to disband PEN, with Nadine Gordimer, among others, arguing that it was ‘the wrong historical moment’ for intraracial collaboration. About turn, salute, redirect moral passion at 180 degrees. The same thing happened with sport: first, a mighty campaign for multiracial ...”

“... to his handling of the cold, controlled tones and ominous historic present associated with Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee. Early on, Galgut’s use of these tones could be too homageful. ‘My name is James. I can’t help that,’ the narrator says in one of the stories in Small Circle of Beings (1988). (Coetzee’s first novel begins: ‘My ...”

“... African exiles in North London – among them Dan Jacobson – gathered to meet the chic and tiny Nadine Gordimer, just in from Johannesburg, and to sample the trays of vol-au-vents and finger-friendly desserts, iced fancies and decorated chocs. Iris Murdoch, white-faced, bluff, confident, sometimes turned up and nibbled. V.S. Pritchett was usually a ...”

“... Schulz, Joseph Roth, W.G. Sebald. The method is less biographical for Saul Bellow, Graham Greene, Nadine Gordimer and others, and a long, frosty essay on Walter Benjamin engages crucial concepts thoroughly and ends in a magnificent, if ambiguous tribute: ‘From a distance, Benjamin’s magnum opus’ – The Arcades Project – ‘is curiously ...”

“... as well as a cohort of South African writers who were wrestling with apartheid, among them Nadine Gordimer, Ezekiel Mphelele, Dennis Brutus and Lewis Nkosi.From the start, Transition had commissioned work from political figures. In the second issue, in 1961, Julius Nyerere published a defence of the one-party system that would soon exasperate so ...”

“... 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 ...”