You Can't Please All

This volume covers four decades: the Eighties and Nineties when the author, Tariq Ali, was no longer engaged in active politics as a party member of any sort but had moved sideways to politico-cultural interventions. During this time, he set up Bandung Productions with Darcus Howe and launched the Bandung File, a unique current affairs show on Channel Four. Subsequently, he introduced Rear Window, which mixed culture, politics, and ideas.

A mixture of anecdotes, reflections, jottings, and storytelling, the book covers defeats and the rise of new movements: social, political, and anti-imperialist. It details 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 and the intellectuals who founded and re-launched the New Left Review: Edward Thompson, Perry Anderson, and Raphael Samuel, as well as Ali's time at Private Eye, the LRB, and The Guardian.