Good morning friends /strategyStephen King provides this week’s strategy. Yep, that Stephen King. Monster-under-the bed-guy. The link is, perhaps, a little oblique, but I suspect the occasional unconvention is part of why you’re here. He introduces each short story in The…
Good morning dear friends I hope you’re well. It is book prize season. This week, the 2025 Orwell Prize for political writing announced their finalists. You can find them here. If this is the first time you’ve read Strategy, Soul…
“That’s what maps mysteriously do: They obliterate information to provide some information at all”.Zia Haider Rahman – In the Light of What We Know Good morning good people Our last few letters have tilted towards the strategy side of this…
Good morning good people As always, thank you for being here. You can read past editions of the newsletter here and find our favourite quotations here. Time Out Magazine released their Best Cities of 2025 ranking two weeks ago. It was…
Good morning dear friends We are back! Five years ago, to the day, I sent this newsletter to a handful of friends for comment. Since then, I’ve written 232 of them. All of you have kindly joined the ride, sending…
Good morning good people Yesterday, after months of rain (for which we are grateful) and weeks of wind, summer arrived on the Cape Peninsula. Gaudy neon ribbons of runners and cyclists wove their way around the coastal road. Happy swimmers…
Dear Friends First, an announcement. From Thursday, my parents are visiting what is a currently a windy Southern Peninsula (the whales seem to be hiding out or have left) and so I am taking a break from writing to spend time…
Dear Friends If you’re visiting Cape Town soon, be sure to see Alexis Preller’s retrospective, Mythical Lexicon at the Norval Foundation. Preller is one of South Africa’s greatest artists, his work an alchemy of the world’s mythologies, a demonstration of sensitivity…
Dear friends Let’s get to it… /strategyI love interviews. The dialogue between a skilled questioner and an intriguing guest is a wonderful format for revealing insight. My favourites are The Paris Review’s Art of Fiction which are often months and multiple conversations…
Hello friends I am back. I’d paused the letter for two weeks to get on top of all I’d read. Although not as productive as I’d hoped, I was partially successful. My research assistants corralled nine recently read books’ highlights into…
Dear friends During the pandemic, I received an email from one of my favourite independent bookstores, Cape Town’s The Book Lounge, with an unusual proposition – ‘send us an email telling us what books you’ve enjoyed, and we’ll make a…
Dear friends Bibliophiles should diarise 4 August and oenophiles 22 August. I first encountered Anna de Koningh, in Phakamisa Ndzamela’s masterfully researched The Native Merchants, which I wrote about here. She started life enslaved and ended it as one of…