Tariq Ali has been a leading figure of the international left since the 60s. Growing up in a communist milieu in Lahore, his first recorded attendance of a meeting was at the age of six on May Day 1949. From the student movement in Pakistan to the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, from Trotsky to Malcolm X, from Lenin to Lennon, his works have had a seismic and global influence on leftist thought.

His latest book, Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes, is out now in paperback.

Latest interventions

A challenge to the worship of Winston Churchill, A chronicle of the consequences of the invasion of Afghanistan, and a rediscovered conversation with Ernest Mandel.

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Eye-witness accounts 

Tariq Ali shares his account of his time as an activist and young radical in the 1960s! It is a story that takes us from Paris and Prague to Hanoi and Bolivia, encountering along the way Marlon Brando, Henry Kissinger, and Mick Jagger.

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Theory

Including an insightful portrait of Lenin’s deepest preoccupations, an essential critique of Obamaism, and a discussion of the future of socialist politics in Britain.

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Internationalism

Ali maintains an international perspective in his work, writing on the War on Terror, the unending occupation of Kashmir, and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela.

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Fiction

These historical novels examine the encounters among Muslims, Christians, and Jews through the ages, from the Crusades to twenty-first-century London.

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Winston Churchill

by Tariq Ali

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 magi...

The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan

by Tariq Ali

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 s...

A Conversation with Ernest Mandel

by Tariq Ali and Ernest Mandel

Ernest Mandel was one of the leading Marxist intellectuals of the 20th century. His impact on the generation of the Sixties extended way beyond his political affiliation to the Fourth International...

Street-Fighting Years

by Tariq Ali

Tariq Ali revisits his formative years as a young radical. Reissued for the 1968 anniversary, Street-Fighting Years captures the mood and energy of the era of hope and passion as Ali tracks the gro...

Uprising in Pakistan

by Tariq Ali

The story of what happened in 1968 in Pakistan is often forgotten, but is yet another proof that the revolutionary moment was global. In that year, following a long period of tumult, a radical coal...

The Extreme Centre

by Tariq Ali

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-r...

The Dilemmas of Lenin

by Tariq Ali

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of the October 1917 uprising, is one of the most misunderstood leaders of the twentieth century. In his own time, there were many, even among his enemies, who acknowle...

The Protocols of the Elders of Sodom

by Tariq Ali

These provocative essays explore the links between literature, history and politics, through an examination of the work of Cervantes, Tolstoy, Proust, Musil, Roth, Platonov, Soltzhenitsyn, Grossman...

Who's Afraid of Margaret Thatcher?

by Tariq Ali and Ken Livingstone

Ken Livingstone is a product of the political changes that have already taken place in the Labour Party. As Leader of the Greater London Council he has provided a voice and a vision for tens of tho...

The Obama Syndrome

by Tariq Ali

Written early in 2010 and initially published in September 2010, The Obama Syndrome predicted the Obama administration’s historic midterm defeat. But unlike myriad commentators who have since pinne...

Rough Music

by Tariq Ali

On July 7, 2005, the murderous mayhem that Blair’s war has sown in Iraq came home to London in a devastating series of suicide bombings. Two weeks later, with apparent impunity, security forces sho...

Bush in Babylon

by Tariq Ali

The assault and capture of Iraq—and the resistance it has provoked—will shape the politics of the twenty-first century. In this passionate and provocative book, Tariq Ali provides a history of Iraq...

The Clash of Fundamentalisms

by Tariq Ali

The aerial attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, a global spectacle of unprecedented dimensions, generated an enormous volume of commentary. The inviolability of the American mainland...

Kashmir

by Tariq Ali, Hilal Bhatt, Angana P. Chatterji, Pankaj Mishra and Arundhati Roy

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 f...

Pirates of the Caribbean

by Tariq Ali

The Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela has brought Hugo Chávez to world attention as the foremost challenger of the neoliberal consensus and American foreign policy. Drawing on first-hand experienc...

Fear of Mirrors

by Tariq Ali

For some East Germans, the fall of communism was like the end of a long and painful love affair: free to tell the truth at last, they found they no longer wanted to hear it. The nation may be reuni...

Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree

by Tariq Ali

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 ...

The Book of Saladin

by Tariq Ali

The Book of Saladin is the fictional memoir of Saladin, the Kurdish liberator of Jerusalem, as dictated to a Jewish scribe, Ibn Yakub. Saladin grants Ibn Yakub permission to talk to his wife and re...

The Stone Woman

by Tariq Ali

Istanbul, 1899. The last great Islamic empire is in serious trouble. The family of Iskender Pasha, an Ottoman notable, has retired to its summer palace. Then a former tutor poses a question which t...

A Sultan in Palermo

by Tariq Ali

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 ...

Night of the Golden Butterfly

by Tariq Ali

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 ...

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