Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... again. And if Scotland wins, perhaps the tired lull of English politics will also be disrupted. Tariq Ali As I debate​ what to write on my ballot paper, I am becoming increasingly irritated by the Electoral Commission’s decision to amend the original wording, ‘Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?’ to ‘Should Scotland ...”

Bristling Ermine

Jeremy Harding: R.W. Johnson, 4 May 2017

Look Back in Laughter: Oxford’s Postwar Golden Age 
by R.W. Johnson.
Threshold, 272 pp., £14.50, May 2015, 978 1 903152 35 5Show More
How Long Will South Africa Survive? The Looming Crisis 
by R.W. Johnson.
Hurst, 288 pp., £12.99, July 2016, 978 1 84904 723 4Show More
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“... scientist Colin Leys. Qualified praise goes to Christopher Hill; there are fond memories of Tariq Ali (who contests one or two details in the memoir). Johnson remembers Hodgkin, a dogged adversary of Pretoria, refusing to sign a petition in favour of anti-apartheid activists who’d torn up the cricket ground in the Parks before the South African ...”

Boris Kagarlitsky, one of the leaders of the left-wing opposition in the Soviet Union, talks to Robin Blackburn

Boris Kagarlitsky, 24 November 1988

“... it home to me that some Asiatic societies have developed quite resilient forms of democracy. Tariq Ali and Achin Vanaik have been right to focus on the problem of why bourgeois democracy survives in India; and because India is a large multi-national state like the Soviet Union, this is a very interesting case for us. R.B.: You mentioned just now the ...”

Diary

Jeremy Harding: My ’68, 19 July 2018

“... those days could be as entrenched as the youth were intransigent. In Street-Fighting Years (1987) Tariq Ali remembers having to flee from a group of Smithfield meat porters and Tilbury dockers marching in support of Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968. A contemptuous tone characterised other kinds of rebel sensibility around the ...”

Siding with Rushdie

Christopher Hitchens, 26 October 1989

The Rushdie File 
edited by Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland.
Fourth Estate/ICA, 268 pp., £5.95, July 1989, 0 947795 84 7Show More
CounterBlasts No 4: Sacred Cows 
by Fay Weldon.
Chatto, 43 pp., £2.99, July 1989, 0 7011 3556 5Show More
Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation 
by Timothy Brennan.
Macmillan, 203 pp., £29.50, September 1989, 0 333 49020 7Show More
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“... envisaged by Bilgrami. This faction is not composed merely of the relatively well-placed, like Tariq Ali and his redoubtable colleagues at Bandung Productions, or Aziz Al-Azmeh at the University of Exeter. It is possessed of a rank and file, including some of the very black feminists whose position Weldon so unfairly represents and who have formed ...”

Iraq Must Go!

Charles Glass: The Making and Unmaking of Iraq, 3 October 2002

“... Jews and many Eastern Christian sects – believed Britain’s promise to Sherif Hussein bin Ali of Mecca that an Allied victory would leave them independent and united. By the time Britain’s other promises became known – granting Palestine to European Jewish Zionists in accordance with the Balfour Declaration and what would become Lebanon and ...”

Wafted to India

Richard Gott: Unlucky Wavell, 5 October 2006

Wavell: Soldier and Statesman 
by Victoria Schofield.
Murray, 512 pp., £30, March 2006, 0 7195 6320 8Show More
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“... in 1947, where he had once been the adviser to the (anti-Partition) premier, Sikander Hayat Khan (Tariq Ali’s grandfather). He was a great admirer of Wavell, a man, he wrote, who had shown himself ‘to be straightforward, just, energetic, firm and decisive’, and had worked tirelessly for the good of India. So in my family Wavell was a much loved ...”

What’s going on, Eric?

David Renton: Rock Against Racism, 22 November 2018

Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge 
by Daniel Rachel.
Picador, 589 pp., £12.99, May 2017, 978 1 4472 7268 7Show More
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“... For several months the area had been a site of conflict between left and right. In May 1978, Altab Ali, a young machinist, was murdered on his way home. In June, a crowd of several hundred skinheads ran through the area, smashing in the windows of Asian-owned shops. The following week, tens of thousands of anti-fascists marched down Brick Lane, and in ...”

Ghosting

Andrew O’Hagan: Julian Assange, 6 March 2014

“... orderly continuation of its initial work. Julian came to lunch at my flat in Belsize Park. Tariq Ali came and so did Mary-Kay Wilmers, the editor of the London Review, as well as an American editor for Verso called Tom Mertes. Anderson’s idea was that Verso would publish a series of books, or one book in which each chapter showed how the US ...”

What I Heard about Iraq

Eliot Weinberger: Watch and listen, 3 February 2005

“... heard the vice president say: ‘I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators.’ I heard Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi foreign minister, say: ‘American soldiers will not be received by flowers. They will be received by bullets.’ I heard that the president said to the television evangelist Pat Robertson: ‘Oh, no, we’re not going to have any ...”

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

“... the women thought this was a bit untrue, but Rania was very much herself. When her brother-in-law Tariq became sick in Cairo and had a leg amputated, it was Rania who insisted to her husband that he go. It was early June 2017 and she said she and the girls would be fine. Hassan remembers her words. ‘She said: “Go and do not leave him,”’ he told ...”