Mike Marqusee – författare

"I'm in it to win. That's my attitude to life and to politics."-Neil Kinnock, December 1989Defeat from the Jaws of Victory takes the reader behind closed doors to witness Kinnock's Labour hierarchy in action-fixing votes, stage-managing meetings, dispensing patronage to favourites and settling scores with enemies.Riding high on the backlash against the Bennite rebellion of the early 1980s, Kinnock went on to build the most autocratic regime in Labour's history. Centralizing power in a vastly expanded private office, he destroyed the party's democratic structures, stripped it of any trace of radical policy, and purged it of hundreds of dissident members. Every nook and cranny of the Labour machine was filled with careerists whose primary qualification was personal loyalty to their leader. Under Kinnock's aegis the party ran up a £2.5 million overdraft, and proved incapable of removing an unpopular Tory government in the midst of the worst recession since the war.Heffernan and Marqusee employ extensive research in Labour's archives and interviews with leading MPs, party employees and constituency members to chronicle, with unsparing accuracy, a decade-long drive for power which was ruthless, reactionary and, in the final analysis, spectacularly unsuccessful.

WINNER OF THE LORD ABERDARE LITERARY PRIZE, 1994SHORTLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD, 1994Now with a new introduction by Rahul Bhattacharya, Anyone But England is a detailed exploration into the origins of cricket; the romance, cultural identity, hypocrisy, flaws of governance and glory of the game.Mike Marqusee, an American who fell in love with cricket when he moved to the UK in the 1970s, looks at the history of elitism and empire, and how race and class have always been issues in the game. Scrutinising the long saga of South Africa’s exclusion from world cricket, Marqusee charts England’s collusion with apartheid, and also details an eye-opening account of Pakistan’s controversial ‘ball-tampering’ tour of England, which provoked intense debate amongst cricket fans about the role of both the media and racism in the modern game.Showing that supporting the game does not mean you need be blind to its flaws, Marqusee’s passion and enthusiasm for cricket is threaded through every element of Anyone But England.

When Muhammad Ali died, many mourned the life of the greatest sportsman the world had ever seen. In Redemption Song, Mike Marqusee argues that Ali was not just a boxer but a remarkable political figure in a decade of tumultuous change. Playful, popular, always confrontational, Ali refashioned the role of a political activist and was central, alongside figures such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, to the black liberation and the anti-war movements. Marqusee shows that sport and politics were always intertwined, and this is the reason why Ali remained an international beacon of hope, long after he had left the ring.