Ambitious tomes offer grand, unrivalled sweep of history

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA: Volume 1 edited by Robert Ross, ­Carolyn Hamilton and Benard K Mbenga; Volume 2 edited by Robert Ross, Anne Kelk Mager and Bill Nasson

(Cambridge University Press)

Andrew MacDonald, Mail & Gaurdian

The late master Eric Hobs­bawm, in his biography Interesting Times, recalled his time as a young radical in the English fens in the 1930s and described what he called Cambridge University's peculiar "principal of unripe time": whatever somebody may propose and however good the proposal, the time is inevitably not yet ripe. Thus it is that the last time Cambridge University Press produced a general volume on South African history, pneumonic plague took the lives of 350 South Africans.