You Can't Please All: Memoirs 1980-2023

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

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.

Reviews

Ali remains an outlier and intellectual bomb-thrower; an urbane, Oxford-educated polemicist * Observer *
Tariq Ali has not lost the passion and vim which made him a symbol of the spirit of '68 . has not seen fit to join forces with the terminally cynical, or set up a graven god that can be accused of failing -- Christopher Hitchens
We need to remember the sixties, and Tariq Ali's book is valuable and well presented evidence of the time . as Ali points out the transition from revolutionary to arch-conservative is nothing new . we may frequently have been misguided, but nothing is sadder than a generation without a cause * Sunday Times [on Street Fighting Years] *

Author Bio

Tariq Ali has written more than two-dozen books on world history and politicsthe most recent of which are The Extreme Centre, The Dilemmas of Lenin and The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan, Winston Churchillas 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.