HERE BE MONSTERS
By Peter Wilhelm
A savage oral epic composed well over 1 000 years ago - for recitation as tribal warriors quaffed their mead and boasted of their prowess - Beowulf is the first surviving Old English text. It has been described as the major Engl...

MILLION DOLLAR MEMORIES

No-one had ever seen Nick Price, golf's ultimate gentleman, that angry. His clear blue eyes were ablaze and a torrent of invective spewed from his mouth. It was so out of character - and, worst of all, I was the target of his displea...

SOUND OF ANGELS
By Heather Formby
From inside Pianoforte in the Design Quarter come the sounds of a Tchaikovsky concerto, a Mozart sonata and then Brahms' Rhapsody in some obscure key. And was that Elton John? The shop is filled with Steinway pianos, described by o...

ART, AFRICA AND BEING ON THE A-LIST

"Not many people like her," remarked painter Penny Siopis when I recently asked after a certain curator. "She's a woman and she's ambitious." After a pause, Siopis, a professor of art at Wits, added: "What's wrong with that?" The ...

MUST SEE: WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

"We'll buy whatever's left, anything," begged punters a day or two after the opening of Kentridge's new show. There was nothing left. While the new prints are a mixed bag, the stereoscopic images incidentally intriguing, the table-t...

BOOK OF THE WEEK
By David Williams
"What is needed in the arts world is confidence and seeming arrogance." That was the view of Robert Shaw, the acclaimed US actor (Jaws, The Sting) and playwright (The Man in the Glass Booth). Substitute "the arts world" w...

GOOD CURRY, HONESTLY
By JUSTICE MALALA
Don't believe everything you are told. Just the other day someone whispered in my ear that I should go nowhere near Wang Thai, the large, rambling Thai eatery on Nelson Mandela Square. "Oh, it's terrible. Absolutely dismal...