Jonny Steinberg

Nov 29, 2024 | fivebooks.com | Jonny Steinberg |Joya Chatterji |Nandini Das |Nicholas Radburn

recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch WINNER OF the 2024 WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century by Joya Chatterji To win the Wolfson History Prize, a book must be both original and accessible to the general reader.

Nov 14, 2024 | businesslive.co.za | Jonny Steinberg

Why are political parties that formed after the end of apartheid so hard to build and grow? Rise Mzansi, ActionSA and Build One SA all did miserably in the 2024 elections. The only exception was the Patriotic Alliance, whose support base grew. Most of those who bothered to vote at all either voted for parties formed during apartheid — the ANC, the DA, the IFP — or for spin-offs from apartheid-era parties such as the EFF and MK party. Why is this happening?

Nov 5, 2024 | fivebooks.com | Jonathan Eig |Ilyon Woo |Jonny Steinberg |Jackie Wullschlager

Biography is a sprawling genre, which can be difficult for the lay person to keep track of. Those who love historical biographies are not necessarily interested in, say, philosophical biographies or sporting biographies, and these books might not even be displayed in the same area of a bookshop—rather being distributed on the shelves relating to their subjects’ areas of expertise.

Oct 31, 2024 | businesslive.co.za | Jonny Steinberg

I was lucky enough to be taken on a tour of the Groote Schuur estate in Rondebosch last year. Among the scenes that have stayed most vividly with me are the bedrooms of Marike and FW de Klerk, which are precisely as they left them. His is resolutely a boy’s room, all mottled greens and dark wood; I would not have been surprised to see fishing rods and a half-built model aeroplane.

Oct 17, 2024 | businesslive.co.za | Jonny Steinberg

Barely a day has passed in the last four months without someone saying how much more comfortable Cyril Ramaphosa looks sharing power. And how good he is at it. It’s been quite a turnaround. When the year began he was the loyalist who put party over country, the weak man without the balls to go after the corrupt, the vacillating man unable to make a decision. Is he still all of those things? Or has the discipline of the government of national unity (GNU) changed him?