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You Can't Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024
A new memoir from renowned political activist and author of Street Fighting An Autobiography of the Sixties
The revolutionary upsurge of 1968–1975 jump-hopped continents with ease but finally petered out. What happened after is the subject of You Can’t Please All. Tariq Ali recounts a life committed to writing and cultural interventions. An eyewitness in Moscow to the fall of the Soviet Union, he was caught up in the intellectual excitement that had gripped the country. In Porto Alegre, Hugo Chávez invited him to visit Caracas, and the two men developed a striking friendship.
Post-2001, as a founding member of the Stop the War Coalition, he became a fierce critic of the War on Terror, visiting many US cities with surprising regularity to engage in debate and discussion, inaugurating a new phase of political activism. Evident in his work is the integral part politics plays in his life. He is one of the most sought-after socialist and anti-imperialist public intellectuals on most continents.
Underlying the narrative is a chain of anecdotes, reflections, jottings and storytelling. The book explores his work for the theatre and film, as well as his fiction, including the acclaimed Islam Quintet. There are pen portraits of friends and comrades such as Edward Said, Derek Jarman, Richard Ingrams, Benazir Bhutto, Mary-Kay Wilmers, and the intellectuals who founded and relaunched New Left Review: E. P. Thompson, Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn.
The book also contains a moving family portrait, describing how his parents met and lived during the early years of Pakistan.
The revolutionary upsurge of 1968–1975 jump-hopped continents with ease but finally petered out. What happened after is the subject of You Can’t Please All. Tariq Ali recounts a life committed to writing and cultural interventions. An eyewitness in Moscow to the fall of the Soviet Union, he was caught up in the intellectual excitement that had gripped the country. In Porto Alegre, Hugo Chávez invited him to visit Caracas, and the two men developed a striking friendship.
Post-2001, as a founding member of the Stop the War Coalition, he became a fierce critic of the War on Terror, visiting many US cities with surprising regularity to engage in debate and discussion, inaugurating a new phase of political activism. Evident in his work is the integral part politics plays in his life. He is one of the most sought-after socialist and anti-imperialist public intellectuals on most continents.
Underlying the narrative is a chain of anecdotes, reflections, jottings and storytelling. The book explores his work for the theatre and film, as well as his fiction, including the acclaimed Islam Quintet. There are pen portraits of friends and comrades such as Edward Said, Derek Jarman, Richard Ingrams, Benazir Bhutto, Mary-Kay Wilmers, and the intellectuals who founded and relaunched New Left Review: E. P. Thompson, Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn.
The book also contains a moving family portrait, describing how his parents met and lived during the early years of Pakistan.
816 pages, Hardcover
Published November 5, 2024
About the author
Tariq Ali
143 books845 followersTariq Ali (Punjabi, Urdu: طارق علی) is a British-Pakistani historian, novelist, filmmaker, political campaigner, and commentator. He is a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review and Sin Permiso, and regularly contributes to The Guardian, CounterPunch, and the London Review of Books.
He is the author of several books, including Can Pakistan Survive? The Death of a State (1991) , Pirates Of The Caribbean: Axis Of Hope (2006), Conversations with Edward Said (2005), Bush in Babylon (2003), and Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (2002), A Banker for All Seasons (2007) and the recently published The Duel (2008).
He is the author of several books, including Can Pakistan Survive? The Death of a State (1991) , Pirates Of The Caribbean: Axis Of Hope (2006), Conversations with Edward Said (2005), Bush in Babylon (2003), and Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (2002), A Banker for All Seasons (2007) and the recently published The Duel (2008).
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 21, 2025
biggest complaint is not an audiobook. on the one hand could perhaps have done with an editor, on the other I find the sprawling rambling structure endearing. what a life, goes everywhere talks to everyone interested in almost everything, if the self presentation can be relied on. and you'd wonder, there's a lot of 'needless to say I had the last laugh'.
do editors of left journals have as much fun these days? I suppose TA had to put in a lot of time with the staff of Private Eye, they sounded insufferable, particularly post-Cockburn. I didn't realise he had a hand in Bandung file.
a lot about the affiliations and disputes within nlr editorial board if you're like me, the kind of sicko interested in that stuff. less detail on the attempted Brennerite / Croatian nationalist coup though, sad!
platonic ideal of one-handed read while bottle-feeding
'He [Ernest Mandel] complained about two minor scenes in the novel, both set in Brazil. During the first I had depicted him and his much younger Brazilian girlfriend, Maya, cavorting naked on a deserted beach, making love and swimming restfully to recover in the calm sea. His complaint here was this was clearly meant to ridicule. I tried to convince him to the contrary but failed'.
'Doris Lessing...stopped me on Hampstead Heath one day: 'is it the case that the Russians have now slaughtered twenty million people in Afghanistan?' 'No', I replied. 'That is the entire population of the country'.
do editors of left journals have as much fun these days? I suppose TA had to put in a lot of time with the staff of Private Eye, they sounded insufferable, particularly post-Cockburn. I didn't realise he had a hand in Bandung file.
a lot about the affiliations and disputes within nlr editorial board if you're like me, the kind of sicko interested in that stuff. less detail on the attempted Brennerite / Croatian nationalist coup though, sad!
platonic ideal of one-handed read while bottle-feeding
'He [Ernest Mandel] complained about two minor scenes in the novel, both set in Brazil. During the first I had depicted him and his much younger Brazilian girlfriend, Maya, cavorting naked on a deserted beach, making love and swimming restfully to recover in the calm sea. His complaint here was this was clearly meant to ridicule. I tried to convince him to the contrary but failed'.
'Doris Lessing...stopped me on Hampstead Heath one day: 'is it the case that the Russians have now slaughtered twenty million people in Afghanistan?' 'No', I replied. 'That is the entire population of the country'.
September 14, 2025
Tariq Ali has been everywhere, met everyone, and still managed to produce a hefty body of work. Impressive.
September 2, 2026
Tariq Ali is one of those rare people who's lived through every major event in the last 60 years and somehow managed to have a seat near the front to witness it. This biography is a doorstopper, but it reads so smoothly that it can be whizzed through. This book is brimming with gossip and intrigue about the NLR, The LRB, Private Eye, Christopher Hitchens, Edward Said, Perry (or 'Rory') and Benedict Anderson. Anybody even remotely interested in the New Left and the leading lights of the British literary establishment is bound to be entertained.
October 29, 2026
I love Tariq Ali's first autobiography, "Street Fighting Years," covering the 1960s to 1980. His recollections about organizing protests against the Vietnam War while hanging out with John Lennon convey the enormous optimism of that generation. This enormous second volume fills in the blanks, covering not just his childhood but his family history back to his grandparents, and also everything he's done since 1980. Ali has given us a complete overview of his life, including lots of miscellaneous essays at the end. As the UK's great left-wing intellectual, he met everyone, went everywhere, and got everything right. Along the way, he managed to write a vast quantity of articles, history books, novels, TV shows, plays, etc.
Ali was a leader of the Trotskyist movement for 13 years, from 1968 to 1980, but he strikes me above all as a consistent democrat. He came from the same milieu that built the Pakistani state, and one can almost imagine him as prime minister — but he is too firmly committed to democratic principles to join such a deformed semi-colonial endeavor. It testifies to the enormous magnetism of Trotskyism in the 1960s that the Fourth International won him over. Whenever revolutionary movements get stronger, Trotskyist ideas spread. I have read the criticism that some of this book feels implausible — I have trouble believing that Trotskyist leaders privately praised his rather mean-spirited novel about breaking with the movement (Redemption, 1990). But I suspect this is the same kind of editing we all do with our memories.
tldr: Definitely read Ali's first autobiography. If you loved that too, dig into this much longer one as well.
Ali was a leader of the Trotskyist movement for 13 years, from 1968 to 1980, but he strikes me above all as a consistent democrat. He came from the same milieu that built the Pakistani state, and one can almost imagine him as prime minister — but he is too firmly committed to democratic principles to join such a deformed semi-colonial endeavor. It testifies to the enormous magnetism of Trotskyism in the 1960s that the Fourth International won him over. Whenever revolutionary movements get stronger, Trotskyist ideas spread. I have read the criticism that some of this book feels implausible — I have trouble believing that Trotskyist leaders privately praised his rather mean-spirited novel about breaking with the movement (Redemption, 1990). But I suspect this is the same kind of editing we all do with our memories.
tldr: Definitely read Ali's first autobiography. If you loved that too, dig into this much longer one as well.
July 24, 2025
Already knew a fair amount about the guy but this was still fascinating. Maybe a bit long
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 23, 2026
A scrapbook turned into a monolith of superior political-historical gossip, as absurd as it is absurdist and truly beyond parody - he's been everywhere, he's talked to everyone, and is never wrong. A vast amount of 'this did not happen, or at least not in the way it's described here' but wildly enjoyable.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews