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“... My dear son, You wrote me a letter you never sent. It wasn’t for me – it was for the whole world to read. (You and your instructions that everything should be burned. Hah!) You were never open and frank with me – that’s one of the complaints you say I was always making against you. You write it in the letter you didn’t want me to read; so what does that sound like, eh? But I’ve read the letter now, I’ve read it anyway, I’ve read everything, although you said I put your books on the night-table and never touched them ...”

“... South Africa, how would she be exercising her art? Could she find any subject other than the one Nadine Gordimer writes about? A great, even a good writer does not find his subject, it takes him over: he becomes it, and the world it has brought with it. But there exist situations in which this is necessarily not the case. Not only the subject but the ...”

“... A novelist’s freedom, Nadine Gordimer wrote in 1975, is ‘his right to maintain and publish to the world a deep, intense, private view of the situation in which he finds his society’. In her new novel, Will, the son named by his book-loving father after William Shakespeare, describes the secret lives led by his parents ...”

“... villagers. All human instinct argues that this is not, after all, an impossible situation. Nadine Gordimer, in her unsparing new novel, suggests otherwise. Her recent Burger’s Daughter, though bleak in its conclusions, was more diffuse and humane; it dealt with an earlier stage in South African history. Set only a little later in time, and in a ...”

“... For almost forty years Nadine Gordimer has been publishing gallant and sensitive stories deploring the apartheid system in her native South Africa. Every book is received with respectful, almost ritual lamentations by London reviewers, reminded of the days of their youth – for the apartheid regime has a longer history than Nazi Germany or even Franco’s Spain ...”

“... Nadine Gordimer continues to send sane, humane reports from the edge of darkness. In her finest stories she fixes authoritatively the experience of her South African characters, who exist in the shadow of a gun. They are menaced by repressive laws, unpredictable violence and a cruel historical process; their small domestic treacheries can carry a fatal undertow of danger ...”

“... for prophecy, denunciation or rhetoric of any kind.The English section, which has 17 writers – Nadine Gordimer is represented twice – stretches itself to include poetry and autobiography. Because of the presence of black and Coloured writers, there is less psychological violence here and more of the ordinary, physical kind. Joel Matlou’s harrowing ...”

“... for it: it is the idea of a domestic life for SS men that offends us most deeply. Inevitably, Nadine Gordimer surfaces in Coetzee’s papers as an antagonist. He considers basing the heroine of Age of Iron on her: ‘She writes novels, has cancer, faces the failure of her career.’ Coetzee doesn’t have the stomach for ...”

“... in the country they live in – is their lives’ sudden inconsequentiality. The characters in Nadine Gordimer’s previous novels have generally had some kind of social purpose – they are lawyers, or doctors, or ‘politicals’ of one kind or another. But Julie and her friends have no purpose, no particular place in the world. She’s the daughter ...”

“... to the general but have won the respect of professional critics, who are favoured: V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, David Storey, Paul Scott, Iris Murdoch, for instance. Beyond that it isn’t easy to see much significance in the list – perhaps there’s a nostalgia for the old Empire (Scott, J.G. Farrell, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, plus ...”

“... direst of all threats in the world’s collective fear,’ the narrator says halfway through Nadine Gordimer’s latest novel, Get a Life, ‘beyond terrorism, suicide bombings, introduction of deadly viruses, fatal chemical substances in innocent packaging, Mad Cow Disease – is “nuclear capability”.’ This does not mean that the US, as ...”

“... of the Rand, a selection of Goldblatt’s photos appeared in Optima magazine with an essay by Nadine Gordimer, ‘A Time and Tailings’. Born in a mining town about 75 kilometres east of Randfontein, Gordimer described the mines as ‘the black man’s baptism by darkness and dust into Western ...”

“... seen as the supreme paradigm both of colonial exploitation and of black-white relations – what Nadine Gordimer called ‘the last great colonial extravaganza’. Having seen apartheid crumble and the ANC come to power, such folk know that good has triumphed over evil and that if any problems persist, they can only be due to the legacy of ...”

“... he accepts or rejects them matters little.’ In her introduction to this edition of the book, Nadine Gordimer takes Memmi to task for his summary dismissal of the left and his refusal to see a role for the ‘coloniser who refuses’. Drawing largely on Southern African history, which Memmi could be forgiven for not anticipating, ...”

“... cultural life, but insists that this is not a party body, even though all its members (who include Nadine Gordimer) are ANC members or sympathisers, and it was set up without any pretence of discussion. At the same time, DAC has launched blistering attacks on the National Arts Initiative, a lobby of artists and administrators who had the temerity to ...”