An anthology of Mike Marqusee's selected articles discussing Bob Dylan, the game of cricket, American Civil rights, Jewish identity, William Blake’s art, nationalism, Big Pharma, Labour Party politics, the films of John Ford, Flamenco music, the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, the BDS campaign, Muhammad Ali and Italian Renaissance painting amongst many other topics explored with Marqusee's acute, erude and kaleidoscopic writings.
Nov 24, 2001
Guardian, 24 November 2001 Thomas Friedman’s New York Times article (Guardian 23 November) on Muslims in India exemplifies the kind of disinformation that has kept people in the US in the dark about global realities. Among the recent events that Friedman omits to report are: the desecration of the Taj Mahal by activists of the… Read more
Nov 20, 2001
Red Pepper, December 2001 It’s been widely observed that the US-led global alliance ‘against terrorism’ is a motley assemblage, bound together by expedience rather than principle. Some would say the same about the global anti-war alliance now being constructed to oppose it. Diversity is certainly the hallmark of this emergent movement, but it is both… Read more
Oct 4, 2001
There is nothing anti-American about opposing the drive to war The Guardian, 4 October, 2001 Reading the fulminations against the alleged anti-Americanism of those opposed to the current drive to war, I feel I’ve come full circle. As an American teenager protesting against the butchery in Vietnam, I became accustomed to being attacked by some… Read more
Oct 1, 2001
Indian Express, 1 October 2001 The fearful events of recent weeks have brought to mind an extraordinary cricket match I was once privileged to witness in a rural hamlet some miles outside Quetta in Pakistan. A wicket had been marked out on a dry, pebbly flat, and a boundary demarcated with little red and yellow… Read more
Sep 28, 2001
Media Workers Against the War, 28 September 2001 I’m thinking today of a remarkable man I met not long ago in Quetta, a city in western Pakistan, a few hours drive from the border with Afghanistan. He was a devout and observant Sunni Muslim. He was also a community activist, who had helped establish women’s… Read more
Aug 11, 2001
Blake would have relished the clergyman who banned Jerusalem The Guardian, 11 August 2001 With so many trying to claim a share in William Blake’s legacy these days, it’s refreshing to see someone roundly reject him. The Reverend Donald Allister, rector of Cheadle, may even have done Blake a favour. Certainly he’ll make a lot… Read more
Jul 17, 2001
International Socialism Journal, Summer 2001 John Rees is right, in International Socialism 90, to highlight the reactionary record of the Wilson-Callaghan government, and to warn against sentimentalising Labour governments of the past. But he tells only part of the story, and as a result his account of the changes in the Labour Party is incomplete…. Read more
Feb 17, 2001
Socialist Outlook, February 2001 When I recently left the Labour Party, after twenty years of active membership, I was surprised at how few people asked me to explain myself. For comrades outside the party, it seemed a step that needed no explanation, and was indeed long overdue. For comrades remaining in the party, it seemed… Read more
Jan 1, 2001
Red Pepper, January, 2001 “The voice of honest indignation is the voice of God,” Blake declares (via his imaginary interlocutor, the prophet Isaiah) in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “I cared not for consequences, but wrote.” Clearly, not a personality for an era of emollience and expediency! Nonetheless, crowds are flocking to the exhibition… Read more
Mar 4, 2000
By Kofi Natambu, Ishmael Reed’s Konch Magazine, 20 March 2000 This is an extraordinary book. It is especially astonishing because just when I began to despair that any one text could possibly do justice to accurately documenting and analyzing the often badly misunderstood and largely misrepresented complexity of either Muhammad Ali, the African American civil… Read more
