This fat selection of Nadine Gordimer's non-fiction gets off to a slightly shaky start, and has a dismaying last couple of hundred pages. In a couple of early pieces, her touch is unsure where it matters most – and in most of the late ones the crown of wisdom, as represented by the Nobel prize for literature, which she won in 1991, slips slowly over her eyes.

Telling Times is a dispiriting book to read because it shows a freedom fighter becoming a prisoner of her own prestige.