You Can’t Please All

Description

A memoir of the political-intellectual life of the revolutionary writer Tariq Ali

This volume covers four decades: The Eighties and Nineties when the author was no longer engaged in active politics as a party-member of any sort, but had moved sideways to politico-cultural interventions: Setting up Bandung Productions (with Darcus Howe) and launching the Bandung File, a unique current affairs show on Channel Four and subsequently Rear Window that mixed culture, politics and ideas.

A mixture of anecdotes, reflections, jottings and story-telling the book covers defeats and the rise of new movements: social, political, anti-imperialist. His friendship with Hugo Chavez and trips to most of South America at the height of the Bolivarian wave The characters who appear in the book reflect life in the Eighties and beyond to the present day.

There are pen-portraits of Edward Said, the intellectuals that founded and re-launched the New Left Review: Edward Thompson, Perry Anderson, Raphael Samuel as well as his time at Private Eye, the LRB and The Guardian.Tariq Ali has written more than two-dozen books on world history and politics—the most recent of which are The Extreme Centre, The Dilemmas of Lenin and The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan, Winston Churchill—as well as the novels of his Islam Quintet and scripts for the stage and screen. He is a long-standing member of the Editorial Committee of New Left Review and lives in London.GB

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