That was the year that was - Tariq Ali talks to David Edgar - A long, satisfying Interview in the London Review of Books which covers a whole slice of history. I have only a distant understanding of British politics, and know Ali more for his historical novels than as a leader of the far left. (His novels are entertaining and offer a different take on history, though they are not historically dependable. I imagine him writing them with a bottle of scotch at his side. On one occasion, in his book on Salah a-Din, he actually contradicts something he said earlier about one of the characters.)

Here's a brilliant paragraph from the interview, from when he was still a youth in Pakistan:

My father was nervous when I started to be politically active. The country was under military rule and politics and marches were forbidden. I was 16, or 16 and a half, and still at school when I read in the papers that a black American, Jimmy Wilson, had been sentenced to death for stealing a dollar. I can still recall that moment of deep shock. We couldn’t believe it. Even if he’d stolen a million, executing him was a bit much. So I got a few schoolfriends together, and said to them: ‘We can’t not do anything.’ I think there were about twenty of us in school uniform marching to the American Consulate on Empress Road, and we were joined en route by lots of street urchins, who thought it was a good cause after we promised Cokes and kebabs later. Because Jimmy Wilson was a Western name, they thought they had to chant ‘Death to …’, so we had to say: ‘No, no – you can’t chant “Death to Jimmy Wilson” – that’s what we’re protesting!’ When we explained it to them, they reversed the chant to ‘Long live Jimmy Wilson!’ So we arrived at the consulate and saw the consul-general. I still remember his name, Dr Spengler, a hard-faced, wrinkled and bespectacled Protestant of German origin, not a trace of sympathy on his face. He didn’t even reply. I said: ‘We’ve got a letter here because you’re going to execute a black American for stealing a dollar and then you say you’re democrats … it’s unacceptable behaviour.’ His response was to ask for our names and when we’d given them he told us he’d be writing to our principal the next morning ‘to tell him who you are, why you did this and asking him to take disciplinary action’. This was my first direct contact with American democracy. We just left. ‘God!’ we said. ‘The guy didn’t even reply to us! Nothing at all, just cold as ice.’