On the contemporary events in the Middle East, Ali says, “it restores sense of balance in this world. It’s not all neoliberalism, it’s not all money money money, its not all celebrity politics: here are millions of people taking their destiny in their own hands saying, ‘In order to win all, you have to be prepared to sacrifice all.’ That is what they’re doing in the Arab world’ … It really is the beginning of a phase that might take five or six years to happen but there is no doubt we are at a turning point …

It rejuvenates you when history is being made, people are out on the streets again, governments are being changed, dictators are are being toppled, students in Europe and workers are beginning to fight for their rights again … When we were young coming out Vietnam demonstrations, we used to get a real frisson when people would say ‘there are veterans from the Spanish civil war of 1936,’ and this band of oldies would come saying ‘Spanish civil war veterans against the war’ … I feel a bit like that now!”


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Writer, journalist and film-maker Tariq Ali was born in Lahore in 1943. He owned his own independent television production company, Bandung, which produced programmes for Channel 4 in the UK during the 1980s. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio and contributes articles and journalism to magazines and newspapers including The Guardian and the London Review of Books. He is editorial director of London publishers Verso and is on the board of the New Left Review, for whom he is also an editor. He writes fiction and non-fiction and his non-fiction includes 1968: Marching in the Streets (1998), a social history of the 1960s; Conversations with Edward Said (2005); Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London, Terror (2005); and Speaking of Empire and Resistance (2005), which takes the form of a series of conversations with the author.

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