You Can't Please All

You Can't Please All:Memoirs 1980-2023

  • Hardback

    + free ebook

    Forthcoming

  • Ebook

    Forthcoming

After the Revolution: A second memoir from author of 'Street-Fighting Years'

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