Ronald Segal

Michael Dyson is Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the author of 12 previous books, and an ordained Baptist minister. Pride is his own contribution to a series of linked lectures and books on the seven deadly sins. There is no doubting the primacy of pride among the seven. The Greeks had a word for it. As hubris, presumption or arrogance, it loomed large, often along with its retribution or nemesis, in drama, poetry, history, philosophy. In the development of Christian theology, St Augustine saw pride as the source of original sin, and Pope Gregory confirmed it as the root of all evil.

Among my earliest recollections is that of wandering into my mother’s bathroom and watching her, toenails incarnadine with polish like pillars above the foam, as she addressed herself sternly along the lines of: ‘I should have covered the jack. Then they could never have made the contract.’ Except for my brother Maurice, who played the piano, we all played bridge in the family, and we continued this in my own home, though my son came to be so much better than all of us that I refused to play with him. Impeccable kindness in criticism is especially hard to take. I had read and enjoyed Sandy Balfour’s previous book, Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8), with the subtitle, ‘A Memoir of Love, Exile and Crosswords’.

R. W. Johnson’s book purports to be a history of South Africa, from the emergence of humankind to the last nation (whatever that may mean). The pace is necessarily brisk and only seldom falls over its feet in the process, as in the movement of numerous ethnic entities provided with little more than their names. This is a trenchant treatment of the subject. It is also, as it advances into recent territory, increasingly tendentious. The part played by economic sanctions in the defeat of apartheid was so important that the record of their adoption and deployment requires an informed, accurate recital.