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“... victory.) When such stories are ploddingly told in Booker-McConnell prize-winning novels, by J.M. Coetzee or Keri Hulme, the books are described as ‘compassionate’ and the judges, at least, seem deeply moved. With Norman Lewis’s tone, especially in ‘non-fiction’, it is possible to provoke a different response – like the response of Denton Welch in ...”

“... talents as a close reader of word and image: one on the novel of ideas from Thomas Mann to J.M. Coetzee and Nicola Barker; the other on the creepily insouciant photographs of Torbjørn Rødland. In both cases, the gimmick’s compromised form seems like the only way to accommodate ‘“ideas” imported from criticism or philosophy’ within a genre, or a ...”

“... world from showering it with praise. ‘Khadra belongs in the ranks of those writers – J.M. Coetzee, for example – who make violence into art,’ Lenora Todaro wrote in the New York Times Book Review. In the daily Times, Michiko Kakutani conceded ‘just how deeply flawed The Swallows is as a piece of storytelling’, but placed Khadra’s ‘chilling ...”

“... new South Africa are those that will decide the destiny of the planet. For Gordimer, unlike J.M. Coetzee, South Africa is still the centre of the world. In Get a Life, Aids and globalisation seize their mainly black victims. Gordimer has always been read predominantly by whites, her grandeur – the Nobel Prize she won in 1991 – viewed by black writers in ...”

“... might loosely be called a philosophical one. Like every worthwhile novelist from Defoe to J.M. Coetzee, Hutchins offers a bold and sometimes painful endorsement of psychological truth-telling. Victorine L’Hommedieu’s favourite ‘man-god’ may be Jesus Christ (at least till someone better comes along) but Maude Hutchins’s seems to have been ...”

“... experience (obtainable, after all, from drugs) he has hitherto been agnostic. He discusses J.M. Coetzee’s claim that his life was changed when, as a teenager in South Africa, he overheard The Well-Tempered Clavier being played next door; an experience reminiscent of its archetype in Augustine’s Confessions, in which another voice in another garden urged ...”

“... echoed in countless university policy statements, and supported by a flurry of recent novels. J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,* for example, portrays a sex-starved manipulator in the role of professor and a passive lily as his student victim; Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal† goes further and paints a boastful sexual predator for whom all women students are ...”

“... Elizabeth Taylor’s best actress Oscar for Butterfield 8. The Big One eluded her. In 2003, J.M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize, which depressed Sontag, Moser writes, since ‘it made it highly unlikely that another English-language writer would receive it in the coming years, and Susan, at seventy, realised she was unlikely to achieve the goal she had set as a ...”

“... events experienced by complicated beings. I was reminded of the captive chimpanzee Sultan in J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, who is commissioned to prove his intelligence by stacking crates to reach a bunch of bananas that has been suspended from the ceiling. Coetzee imagines Sultan’s response to this set-up. The ...”

“... are not entirely reversed. Milla (like Susan Barton probing the secrets of the mute Friday in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe) is still demanding to hear the stories Agaat withholds; in response, Agaat offers obfuscation, mimicry, double-speak, as she refuses fully to submit to the role forced on her by colonialism and white supremacy. Exactly how Agaat feels about Milla ...”