Saturday, 3 June 2023
Darryl Accone has been in journalism for the best part of four decades. He is also a Fellow of the Salzburg Seminar and the International Writers Workshop of Hong Kong Baptist University and the author of ‘All Under Heaven: The Story of a Chinese Family in South Africa’ and ‘Euripides Must Die’.
In Text Messages this week, monomania takes many forms. Most deadly perhaps is Jay Gatsby’s hunt in the present for the possibility of bringing the past back to life.
In Text Messages this week, the literary deaths of Alan Paton’s Absalom Kumalo and George Orwell’s ‘one mind less’ come to life in Myanmar with the junta’s ominous declarations.
In Text Messages this week, the sport loses the last vestiges of being a beautiful game played by people who have something in common with their supporters.
In Text Messages this week, Arthur Miller’s classic play The Crucible reminds us of the imperishable value of conscience, integrity and keeping one’s good name.
Would that Good Friday were the catalyst for a coming together in Ukraine, as Father Yánaros implores in The Fratricides.
In Text Messages this week, Mikhail Bulgakov proves prescient about Russia’s war in Ukraine in his posthumous 1966 novel The Master and Margarita.
In Text Messages this week, the rulers of Russia, China and the United States slug it out in a Tolkien-esque saga to determine who will rule them all.
History has run off the groove of the ‘liberal world order’ and on to a new trajectory, propelled by Russia’s attack on Ukraine, for which all sides are responsible and deserving of blame.
In Text Messages this week, humans continue to desecrate the lunar body despite centuries of prose and discovery that capture its elusive and alluring magic.
In Text Messages this week, the author would have approved of Raymond Zondo’s and Sue Gray’s plain-speak, even if Aristotle disagreed with him on justice.
In Text Messages this week, Novak Djokovic and Boris Johnson have both tried to talk their way out of sticky situations. But happily for Plato, the truth (a possible Wordle solution, btw) will out.
In Text Messages this week, the timid world championship chess match taking place in Dubai has nothing on the battle almost 50 years ago in Iceland between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer.
In Text Messages this week, if the world started ‘thinking like women … it would end violence against women and children’ – and against the planet.
In Text Messages this week, democracy has been degraded and devalued, with elections providing only cyclical, cynical and farcical distractions. It’s time for the ballot box to go.
In Text Messages this week, literature Nobel winner Abdulrazak Gurnah is a superb writer who was telling stories of migrants long before it became fashionable in literary circles.
In Text Messages this week, fiction and reality blur as Aukus increases the possibility of a real-life confrontation as seen in the second film adaption of Nevil Shute’s On The Beach.
In Text Messages this week, there is a hope that the 26th climate summit in Glasgow will bring about a spring as exalted by the greatest poets to follow the winter of climate catastrophe.
In Text Messages this week, Virginia Woolf’s uncomfortable questions about women and their place in the world are as valid today as they were at the time of her 1928 speech.
In Text Messages this week, Sid Lowe’s collective writings on Lionel Messi would be the equivalent of Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano’s book: a masterful celebration of mastery.
In Text Messages this week, historian Arnold J Toynbee’s emphasis on the South-West Asian country as ‘a key-point in the structure of empires’ is poignant as the world abandons it.
In Text Messages this week, Piet Rampedi would have done well to heed early historians Herodotus and Thucydides – arguably the first foreign correspondents – when it came to his decuplets story.