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You Can't Please All
Memoirs 1980-2024
Brief Description
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...
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You Can't Please All
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A new memoir from renowned political activist and author of Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties
After the Revolution: A second memoir from author of 'Street-Fighting Years'
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Description
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.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781804290903
Publisher: Verso Books
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 05 November 2024
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Verso Books
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Width: 153.0mm
Height: 234.0mm
Weight: 900g
Pages: 816
About the Author
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.
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Winston Churchill
The subject of numerous biographies and history books, Winston Churchill has been repeatedly voted as one of the greatest of Englishmen. Even today, Boris Johnson, in his failing attempts to be magisterial, has adopted many of his hero's mannerisms! And, as Tariq Ali agrees, Churchill was undoubtedly right in 1940-41 to refuse to capitulate to fascism. However, he was also...Paperback$2699Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Street-Fighting Years
Tariq Ali revisits his formative years as a young radical. Reissued for the 1968 anniversary, Street-Fighting Years captures the mood and energy of an era filled with hope and passion as Ali tracks the growing significance of the nascent protest movement. Through his own story, he recounts a counter-history of the 60s, a decade rocked by the effects of the...Paperback$3899Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
The Extreme Centre
In this fully updated edition of his coruscating polemic, Tariq Ali shows how, since 1989, politics has become a contest to see who can best serve the needs of the market. In this urgent and wide-ranging case for the prosecution, Ali looks at the people and the events that have informed this moment across the world. This reaches its logical...Paperback$2299Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan
The NATO occupation of Afghanistan is over, and a balance-sheet can be drawn. These essays on war and peace in the region reveal Tariq Ali at his sharpest and most prescient. Rarely has there been such an enthusiastic display of international unity as that which greeted the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Compared to Iraq, Afghanistan became the ‘good war’....Paperback$2199Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
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Tariq Ali tells us the story of the aftermath of the fall of Granada by narrating a family sage of those who tried to survive after the collapse of their world. Ali is particularly deft at evoking what life must have been like for those doomed inhabitants, besieged on all sides by intolerant Christendom. "This is a novel that have...Paperback$3499Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
A Sultan in Palermo
The fourth novel in Tariq Ali's 'Islam Quintet' charts the life and loves of the medieval cartographer Muhammed al-Idrisi. Torn between his close friendship with the sultan and his friends who are leaving the island or plotting a resistance to Norman rule, Idrisi finds temporary solace in the harem; but his conscience is troubled... A Sultan in Palermo is a...Paperback$3499Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Night of the Golden Butterfly
Night of the Golden Butterfly concludes the Islam Quintet—Tariq Ali’s much lauded series of historical novels, over twenty years in the writing, which has been translated into a dozen languages. Completing an epic panorama that began in fifteenth-century Moorish Spain, the concluding novel moves between the cities of the twenty-first century, from Lahore to London, from Paris to Beijing. The...Paperback$3499Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
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The Stone Woman
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The Lenin Scenario
Commissioned by Oliver Stone in 2015 for the centenary of the Russian Revolution, Tariq Ali's captivating screenplay of the life and times of Vladimir Lenin brings one of the most exciting moments in history to life. From the author of The Dilemmas of Lenin, Ali's drama recasts the historic figures anew. From young firebrand to global revolutionary leader, Lenin remains...Paperback$2899Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Kashmir
Kashmir is one of the most protracted and bloody occupations in the world—and one of the most ignored. Under an Indian military rule that, at half a million strong, exceeds the total number of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, freedom of speech is non-existent, and human rights abuses and atrocities are routinely visited on its Muslim-majority population. In the...Paperback$5600Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 2-3 weeks -
Leon Trotsky
Amusing, well-researched, and surprisingly sophisticated, Leon Trotsky: An Illustrated Introduction is the perfect primer on the life and thought of the great leader and chronicler of the Russian Revolution. With sympathy and humour, Tariq Ali and Phil Evans trace Trotsky's political career, from prison to the pinnacle of revolutionary power, and finally to his eventual exile and murder by Joseph...Paperback$4500Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 2-3 weeks
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