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" Personally, I have detested Gordon Brown since the moment in 2001 when he tried to make cheap capital out of the Laura Spence affair; as his troubles have piled up, I have felt no sympathy for him at all. "

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" If Franschhoek has a fault, it is in the lavish refurbishment of wine farms and estates which has reached absurd proportions. Some, like Graf Delaire Estate, are brand new, with jewellery shops, indoor streams, and very high-end lodges for rent at prices not many South Africans can afford. "

Justin Cartwright

New

Brand

Fault

" If I was at home, I'd find myself checking email and looking at the Internet when I should be working. In the library, I can get an awful lot done in a couple of hours, but it can become quite sociable, which you have to watch out for. There are a lot of people you can pop out and have a coffee with. "

" The ANC was the product of a much earlier South Africa, a gradualist and non-tribal multi-racial organisation, driven to violence by the intransigence of the Afrikaner Nationalist Government, obsessed with improbable ideas of revolution. "

" James McBride's 'The Good Lord Bird' is set in the mid-19th century and is based on the real life of John Brown, the one who lies a-mouldering in his grave. "

" It's true that all my novels have been versions of myself to some degree. "

" It is a commonplace to say that novelists should be judged by their work rather than their private lives or their publicly expressed views. And writers, of course, subscribe enthusiastically to this idea. "

" Jim Crace's novels have one thing in common, which is that each is set in an entirely original world. None of these worlds is of a specific time or place, but they seem to have some connection to our own lives. "

" 'The Cauliflower' is not strictly a novel, as Barker says in her indispensable afterword. "

" Someone once pointed out that there are quite a lot of animals in my books, and I'm sure that is something to do with 'The Wind in the Willows.' I must have picked up a rather anthropomorphic view of them. "

Justin Cartwright

Books

View

" I suppose on the filmmaking side, you can learn how to cram a lot into a small space. But I think that advertising, even on what is called the creative side, is incredibly easy if you have that kind of mind. A lot of people regard it as Machiavellian and dangerous, but, in fact, it is morally neutral. "

" My brother and I were brought up sort of thinking that we were English. I remember hearing the poet Roy Campbell on the radio and being quite shocked that he had a South African accent. I didn't know there were any South African poets. "

" The Bodleian Library, next to the Sheldonian, is one of the great libraries of the world. As well as holding most of the books printed in England since the first quarter of the 17th century, it houses priceless printed texts, manuscripts, and collections. "

" Historians and journalists always have agendas, but if I want to find out what's going on in South Africa, I read Nadine Gordimer or John Coetzee because they offer novelistic truth. "

" Advertising, the product of capitalism, can only justify itself on the premise that the market is a force for good. "

" This is the strange thing about South Africa - for all its corruption and crime, it seems to offer a stimulating sense that anything is possible. "

" Homer Collyer's chosen form of self-expression is the piano, although late in life, when his hearing also goes, he takes to writing. "

" It is uncomfortable to be reminded that the Catholic church only removed the reference to 'perfidious Jews' from the Good Friday liturgy in 1960. "

" You can't believe anything that's written in an historical novel, and yet the author's job is always to create a believable world that readers can enter. It's especially so, I think, for writers of historical fiction. "

" Just before the opening of the 20th century, the Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, are born into great privilege on the Upper East Side of New York, in a mansion overlooking Central Park. "

" When Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature at the age of 88, she was the oldest person ever to receive the prize and one of only 11 female winners in its history. Her award was the end of a very long journey from a remote farm in Rhodesia to a banquet at Stockholm's Stadshus, the grand city hall in Stockholm. "

" The working-class Africans are not doing very well, and one of the problems is their education is so shocking. It is routinely said it is a result of apartheid. Deliberately, black people were not allowed to know too much. They could read and write a bit to be useful, but that's about it. "

" In the new artisan coffee movement, Jeremy Challender, a 32-year-old Australian who is one of the founders of Prufrock Coffee, explains precision is everything for the barista. Jeremy is able to analyse his coffee with the benefit of an app on his phone. "

" Peter Stanford is a writer on religious and ethical matters. He was for four years editor of the 'Catholic Herald.' "

" There's this idea of bankers retiring and painting watercolours. You can't dabble in art - it's a life. Being a writer, an artist... is a whole life. "

" Complete barista-standard coffee machines cost from £1,600 to more than £20,000. "

Justin Cartwright

Coffee

Than

" The successful advertising agent is the one who can convince the clients that he knows something they don't. "

" Nadine Gordimer came over just before she died. She didn't want to talk about books or the arts, but about the abuse of the constitution by the government. "

" Nicola Barker is both prodigiously talented and admirably fearless. I have loved her books. But for some time, I had little or no idea what the point of the story of Sri Ramakrishna was. In fact, he was one of the outstanding men of 19th-century India. "

" Germany led the world in photography and film: 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari' and 'Metropolis' are works that, to this day, film buffs revere. "

" It is true that it is usually for their books that novelists reserve their most considered and ordered thoughts, but the fact is they arise inescapably from one consciousness: the same one that is occupied in all the other activities which make up a life. "

Justin Cartwright

Thoughts

Life