C.L.R. James: A Life Beyond the Boundaries
JOHN L. WILLIAMS
(CONSTABLE, 496 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • tel 020 7799 4064
It did not seem possible that Clive Lionel Robert James, born in a Caribbean outpost of the British Empire in 1909, could ever become “the Black Plato”, as his obituary in The Times described him. His great-grandfather was a slave in Barbados, his grandfather a pan-boiler on a sugar estate in Trinidad, and his father a schoolteacher in a remote rural village amid the cocoa plantations.
From these inauspicious beginnings, he built a lifelong career as a professional revolutionary, cricket writer, anti-colonialist campaigner, pamphleteer, dramatist and philosopher across five continents, before dying aged 88 upstairs in the offices of the Race Today Collective in Brixton, south London. He also had three marriages and managed to squeeze in many more affairs.
