You Can't Please Everyone: Tariq Ali's Memoirs 1980-2024 Reviews Maddening Entertainment | Books

Ohn an afternoon in the early 1980s, Tariq Ali, wearing only a towel, bounded into a room at the Private Eyes offices in Soho. His mission was to free the magazine's editor, Richard Ingrams, from a tedious interview with Daily Mail hacker Lynda-Lee Potter. Mr. Ingrosse, said Ali, pretending to be an Indian guru, it's time for meditation. Please remove all clothing.

It's a shame Potter died because I would love to hear his side of the story. As Ali reports, did she almost pass out before excusing herself and leaving? Was she fooled by the ruse that ended with Ingrams and Ali laughing over pastries in the nearby Maison Bertaux? Or did she, as seems more likely, immediately recognize Britain's greatest Trotskyist intellectual, born in Lahore and educated at Oxford, after whom the Rolling Stones are said to have named their song Street Fighting Man, if only 'because of his fabulous mustache? We will never know.

There were other versions of this story, Ali tells us on page 107. This is the only one that bears the seal of total accuracy. It's a line that characterizes this entertaining, politically engaged and yet infuriating 800-page book, in which, as is obligatory in the autobiographical genre, the author grades his own homework and gives himself an A+.

Earlier this year, I reviewed Liz Truss's infinitely more gruesome memoir and called it an unintentional update of Trollope's He Knew He Was Right. Boris Johnson's memoir overshadows both Truss and Ali in its lack of humility or self-criticism. But the point remains: although Tariq Ali is intelligent, cultured and good company in this book, he is not the mea culpa type.

There is a very long chapter on a bitter coup on the editorial board of New Left Reviews on which Ali served, and even I, someone who wrote two books for the book publishing arm of the NLF , Verso, and so one might expect to find such things exciting, wondering. if I had the upper body strength to lift the book across the room.

It also reproduces correspondence with the late great historian EP Thompson about the politics of the NLR office when in reality I would have much preferred the two men to discuss the destruction of the English working class in Great Britain. Thatcher's Britain. Never mind. Ali continues, settling scores even though the protagonists are long dead or have noticeably forgotten what so upset them at the time.

Lenin wrote that left-wing communism was an infantile disorder; Freud described the narcissism of small differences; Monty Python defeated the Trots' tendency to spend their energy on internecine conflicts rather than overthrowing capitalism: Ali learned too little from everyone.

And yet I couldn't help but feel nostalgic for Ali's glory years as a broadcaster in the 1980s, when he wrote a script about Spinoza and then visited Derek Jarman in Dungeness to check how the ailing director was getting by with his Wittgenstein biopic. It was during this time that Ali and Trinidad-born broadcaster and activist Darcus Howe collaborated to produce the cultural and current affairs show of unprecedented ardor and ethnic diversity , The Bandung File for Channel 4.

He begins his book in Southall, west London, in 1979, when he is thrown down the stairs of the town hall by cops during the same anti-National Front demonstration at which Blair Peach , a New Zealand professor and supporter of the Anti-Nazi League, was killed by a National Front officer. The Met's famous special patrol group. At the time, Ali was a candidate for the International Marxist Group in the general election that would bring Margaret Thatcher to power.

I trembled with indignation as I read Ali's description of the brutal repression of the protests. He writes that he and like-minded anti-racists, including the reggae band Misty in Roots, were roughed up by police and then brought before a racist justice system. Forty-five years later, is Britain less racist and the state less corrupt than it was in the terrible times Ali described?

Ali goes from street fighter to Trotskyist Zelig, appearing everywhere. After Southall, he found himself interviewing Indira Gandhi, telling her that Pakistan was unlikely to invade Kashmir. He witnessed the fall of the Soviet Union, became friends with Hugo Chvez, was a founding member in 2001 of the Stop the War coalition and concluded with a passionate analysis of Gaza. For all its faults, this is a superbly invigorating tour of the world, written by a historical materialist who was 80 at the time of the book's composition, in which he is often insightful and generally correct in his analyses.