"Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly.”

A leading figure on the radical left for over six decades, Tariq Ali is a renowned writer, filmmaker, and public intellectual. A longtime editor at New Left Review, author of more than 50 books and frequent contributor to The Guardian, CounterPunch, and the London Review of Books, his influence on the intellectual landscape of the left cannot be overstated.

Born in Lahore and educated at Oxford, where he led the Oxford Union and became a figurehead of the 1960s anti-Vietnam War movement, Ali has remained one of the Anglophone left's most independent voices—equally willing to challenge Western liberalism and the failures of postcolonial states. His vast body of work—spanning fiction, history, and polemic—includes The Clash of Fundamentalism, Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crime, and his Islam Quintet of novels.

"Ali remains an outlier and intellectual bomb-thrower; an urbane, Oxford-educated polemicist." — The Observer