Stuart Laing – författare

The first volume of stage and TV plays by one of the best British TV writers Flint premiered just before the 1970 General Election which was to replace the Labour Government of Harold Wilson. It is driven by the figure of Ossian Flint, a seventy-year old swinging vicar who believes in "crossing lines not drawing them" and espouses the romanticised Communism of Lenin and Guevara; In the BBC play The Bankrupt, Ellis Cripper, a woman aged fifty has become bankrupt through operating at "the dishonourable end of the system...capitalism"; An Afternoon at the Festival centres around a version of middle-aged man Leo Brent who is an extreme egoist and a failure in his personal relationships; Duck Song was first produced in the dying days of the failing Heath government and the characters represent a society in decline as the younger characters attempt to find a solution through feminism or psychiatry, it presents "a world to which one cannot relate, which one cannot control, which one can't understand, and which one can't manipulate"; The Arcata Promise centres around the attraction betwen an actor and an inexperienced girl and the destructive conclusion of such an attraction; Find Me returns to the theme of ideological conflict and Eastern Europe; Huggy Bear, a Yorkshire Television production that depicts Hooper, an infantile and philosophical dentist with a "failure to integrate".

Tippu Tip was chiefly an ivory trader, who pioneered for new sources through present day Tanzania into the Congo basin. Slavery is part of his story, because Arab traders of the time used slaves as porters and sold slaves through the market in Zanzibar to work locally in plantations and beyond in the Gulf and Persia. He was a pioneer of discovery, both in Arab terms and because this was the great period of European exploration in East and Central Africa: he assisted most of the famous explorers, including Livingstone and Stanley, when it served his interests. He can be seen as an Afro-Arab exponent of empire, as his commercial ambitions could only be realized by means of Arab territorial control and colonization. His colorful life culminated in his engagement as governor of a province in the 'Congo Free State' of the Belgian King Leopold, and in his involvement in Stanley's astonishing expedition to relieve Emin Pasha, governor of the Egyptian southern province of Equatoria. Uniquely among Arabs and Africans of this era, Tippu Tip wrote an autobiography.Stuart Laing draws on this and other contemporary sources to give a graphic account of the life and times of this energetic, resourceful, ruthless but often humorous operator. We watch him as he accumulates wealth and power, but then has to stand by helplessly as the British and German colonial machine carves up the territory of his friend and protector, the Omani Sultan of Zanzibar, and as the Belgian empire in the Congo drives the Arabs out of the trading areas of influence they had established west of Lake Tanganyika. This book is the first thorough investigation in English of this significant figure. The lucid narrative unfolds against the political and economic backdrop of European and American commercial aims, while allowing the reader to see the period through African and Arab eyes. The fascinating figures who strutted the 19th-century African stage, and their hardly believable exploits, give this book an appeal reaching beyond the African specialist to the general reader.