NICK MATTHEWS welcomes the return of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s music to the repertoire of this years’ Three Choirs Festival
Extended trot
STEVEN ANDREW recommends an informed and personable work that contains as many ommisions as it does analyses
NO MINCING WORDS: Anti-Nato graffiti on a wall during the bombing of Novi Sad in 1999. Total civilian casualties of Nato bombings of Yugoslavia are estimated at probably 2,000 killed and about 6,000 wounded
[Darko Dozet/CC] 
LEO BOIX reviews a caustic novel of resistance and womanhood by Buenos Aires-born Lucia Lijtmaer, and an electrifying poetry collection by Chilean Vicente Huidobro
MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024
Tariq Ali, Verso, £35
HAVING thoroughly enjoyed Tariq Ali’s earlier autobiographical book, Street Fighting Years, and having more than appreciated many other works such as his widely read and timely The Clash Of Fundamentalisms, it’s nice to report that this latest momentous tome was in no way a disappointment.
That said, it’s very different from Ali’s earlier life story in that it is a huge, unwieldy and somewhat chaotic collection. It is fair to say that Ali is not without a shortage of interests — or a shortage of words for that matter — and I won’t even attempt to list the number of subjects covered in an account by no means chronological and seamless in treatment.
Ali’s movement away from more overtly ideological forms of Trotskyism is documented by notes on internal struggles within the International Marxist Group which he left to join a leftwards-shifting Bennite Labour Party, and by his relationship with key international figures such as Ernest Mandel.
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