Definable Traces in the Atmosphere,
Mike Marquesse, OR Books
Mike Marqusee was an anti-Zionist Jewish American socialist activist, poet, journalist, pamphleteer, novelist and author who wrote about cricket with more grace and insight than just about anyone in his adopted country of England. When he died of bone cancer in 2015 memorial meetings were held in Islington and India, where Marquesee's columns in The Hindu had gained him a devoted readership.
"Losing Mike", The Nation's sports editor Dave Zirin wrote, "is like losing several pints of blood". In Delhi, friends reminisced about the "cold intellectual commitment" that made it possible for Marqusee to clarify complex political phenomena through his luminous ruminations on cricket. In London, a backbench Labour member of the British parliament recalled a woman stopping him as he cycled home on a cold and wet night to inquire about Marqusee's health a month before his death. The MP, who first met Marqusee as a young campaigner in north London in the 1960s, remembered the American as an "inspiration to the disparate group of youth who enjoyed zany evenings" with him at the local pub; the friendly acquaintance lubricated by drink and conversation matured over the decades into a loyal friendship cemented by mutual affection and fidelity to socialism.
And six months after Marqusee's premature departure, his obscure intellectual comrade, notorious throughout his parliamentary career for principled rebellion, was abruptly lofted into the office of the leader of the opposition in a race he had entered with 100/1 odds. In one of his first major events as leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn paid tribute to his intellectual mentor by reading from an anthology of his poems to a captive audience in London. Definable Traces in the Atmosphere is a title borrowed from a poem from that collection, and the writings gathered here by Liz Davies, a distinguished lawyer and Marqussee's partner of more than 25 years, are a testament to the vigour, virtuosity and range of their late author's intellect.
There are sparkling essays on Muhammad Ali and Bob Dylan – subjects, respectively, of Marqusee's Redemption Song (1999) and Chimes of Freedom (2003) – that rescue them from the claims of the state and place them at the centre of radical political traditions. Marqusee's encomium for his hero Tom Paine – "prime menace and demon, the carrier of the dreaded French disease" in the eyes of the British establishment – does not yield to the view adopted by most biographers that his years in France were tragic; they were, Marqusee insists with the certainty of a romantic separated by centuries from the revolutionary horrors to which Paine was exposed in Paris, heroic.
He repudiates the conservatism of Paine’s intellectual bête noire Edmund Burke with a stirring case for utopia. “Utopias provide a perspective from which the assumed limitations of the present can be scrutinised, from which familiar social arrangements are exposed as unjust, irrational or superfluous”, Marqusee writes. “You can’t chart the surface of the earth, compute distances or even locate where you are without reference to a point of elevation – a mountain top, a star or satellite. Without utopias we enjoy only a restricted view of our own nature and capacities. We cannot know who we are.”
The London riots of 2011 prompt him to revisit William Blake's London – "a psyche, a city of the mind" – to argue for its inclusive spirit: "A London of free labourers, in which individual and collective creativity flourish together, a city thriving off the dialectic of the one and the many."
Davies has included a lovely memoir of her late partner’s first visit to India in the 1970s, a tour that forever changed his life. Cricket was the preferred lens through which he examined the subcontinent’s history and politics, and there is plenty of elegant, and some elegiac, writing about his beloved game. “People are urged to see the triumphs of the Indian elite … as the country’s triumphs”, Marqusee writes at the advent of the Indian Premier League. “Status by proxy is offered as a substitute for real empowerment.”
For a Jewish intellectual who opposed Israel with the same intensity and passion that many Muslim Indian nationalists opposed the creation of Pakistan, Marqusee could be disappointingly anodyne in his appraisal of the intra-sub-continental politics of South Asia. The hardened convictions that informed his view of what was just and unjust dissolved, when confronted with the India-Pakistan rivalry, into untypically politically polite banalities about peace. How could India have arrived at a synthesis, one wishes Marqusee had asked, with the antithesis of its composite nationalism? Maybe the question is obsolete in the age of Narendra Modi’s Hindu-supremacist rule; but his reluctance to defend India’s secular nationalism, pre-Modi, from external sectarian adversaries – along the lines, say, of his defence of pluralistic societies from the particularistic claims of Zionism – is emblematic of that enduring intellectual vice of the left of which Marqusee was such a towering figure: its failure to condemn ethno-religious nationalism in all its forms.
Moving away from India, Marqusee’s diary entries from his 1997 campaign to re-elect Corbyn to parliament are full of astringent observations about the direction of Labour under Tony Blair. From his deep anxieties about Blairism to his fierce opposition to the Iraq war, Marqusee has been thoroughly vindicated by history. But perhaps even he would struggle, were he alive, with the rapid turn of events that have placed his old comrade, unapologetically brandishing ideas and beliefs that first brought them together, on the threshold of power. Still, it’s a tragedy that Marqusee isn’t around to savour the moment.
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Read more:
Book review: A Morocco Anthology: Travel Writing through the Centuries
My favourite reads: Rupert Hawksley
The Man Booker prize longlist has been announced and includes a graphic novel
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The specs
Engine: 4.0-litre flat-six
Torque: 450Nm at 6,100rpm
Transmission: 7-speed PDK auto or 6-speed manual
Fuel economy, combined: 13.8L/100km
On sale: Available to order now
The Old Slave and the Mastiff
Patrick Chamoiseau
Translated from the French and Creole by Linda Coverdale
Key facilities
- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
- Premier League-standard football pitch
- 400m Olympic running track
- NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
- 600-seat auditorium
- Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
- An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
- Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
Skewed figures
In the village of Mevagissey in southwest England the housing stock has doubled in the last century while the number of residents is half the historic high. The village's Neighbourhood Development Plan states that 26% of homes are holiday retreats. Prices are high, averaging around £300,000, £50,000 more than the Cornish average of £250,000. The local average wage is £15,458.
NO OTHER LAND
Director: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal
Stars: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham
Rating: 3.5/5
Graduated from the American University of Sharjah
She is the eldest of three brothers and two sisters
Has helped solve 15 cases of electric shocks
Enjoys travelling, reading and horse riding
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%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EDirector%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20James%20Wan%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EStarring%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Jason%20Mamoa%2C%20Patrick%20Wilson%2C%20Amber%20Heard%2C%20Yahya%20Abdul-Mateen%20II%C2%A0%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3ERating%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%202%2F5%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
The specs
Price: From Dh529,000
Engine: 5-litre V8
Transmission: Eight-speed auto
Power: 520hp
Torque: 625Nm
Fuel economy, combined: 12.8L/100km
Who are the Sacklers?
The Sackler family is a transatlantic dynasty that owns Purdue Pharma, which manufactures and markets OxyContin, one of the drugs at the centre of America's opioids crisis. The family is well known for their generous philanthropy towards the world's top cultural institutions, including Guggenheim Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate in Britain, Yale University and the Serpentine Gallery, to name a few. Two branches of the family control Purdue Pharma.
Isaac Sackler and Sophie Greenberg were Jewish immigrants who arrived in New York before the First World War. They had three sons. The first, Arthur, died before OxyContin was invented. The second, Mortimer, who died aged 93 in 2010, was a former chief executive of Purdue Pharma. The third, Raymond, died aged 97 in 2017 and was also a former chief executive of Purdue Pharma.
It was Arthur, a psychiatrist and pharmaceutical marketeer, who started the family business dynasty. He and his brothers bought a small company called Purdue Frederick; among their first products were laxatives and prescription earwax remover.
Arthur's branch of the family has not been involved in Purdue for many years and his daughter, Elizabeth, has spoken out against it, saying the company's role in America's drugs crisis is "morally abhorrent".
The lawsuits that were brought by the attorneys general of New York and Massachussetts named eight Sacklers. This includes Kathe, Mortimer, Richard, Jonathan and Ilene Sackler Lefcourt, who are all the children of either Mortimer or Raymond. Then there's Theresa Sackler, who is Mortimer senior's widow; Beverly, Raymond's widow; and David Sackler, Raymond's grandson.
Members of the Sackler family are rarely seen in public.
THE BIO
Family: I have three siblings, one older brother (age 25) and two younger sisters, 20 and 13
Favourite book: Asking for my favourite book has to be one of the hardest questions. However a current favourite would be Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier
Favourite place to travel to: Any walkable city. I also love nature and wildlife
What do you love eating or cooking: I’m constantly in the kitchen. Ever since I changed the way I eat I enjoy choosing and creating what goes into my body. However, nothing can top home cooked food from my parents.
Favorite place to go in the UAE: A quiet beach.
In numbers: PKK’s money network in Europe
Germany: PKK collectors typically bring in $18 million in cash a year – amount has trebled since 2010
Revolutionary tax: Investigators say about $2 million a year raised from ‘tax collection’ around Marseille
Extortion: Gunman convicted in 2023 of demanding $10,000 from Kurdish businessman in Stockholm
Drug trade: PKK income claimed by Turkish anti-drugs force in 2024 to be as high as $500 million a year
Denmark: PKK one of two terrorist groups along with Iranian separatists ASMLA to raise “two-digit million amounts”
Contributions: Hundreds of euros expected from typical Kurdish families and thousands from business owners
TV channel: Kurdish Roj TV accounts frozen and went bankrupt after Denmark fined it more than $1 million over PKK links in 2013
Dates for the diary
To mark Bodytree’s 10th anniversary, the coming season will be filled with celebratory activities:
- September 21 Anyone interested in becoming a certified yoga instructor can sign up for a 250-hour course in Yoga Teacher Training with Jacquelene Sadek. It begins on September 21 and will take place over the course of six weekends.
- October 18 to 21 International yoga instructor, Yogi Nora, will be visiting Bodytree and offering classes.
- October 26 to November 4 International pilates instructor Courtney Miller will be on hand at the studio, offering classes.
- November 9 Bodytree is hosting a party to celebrate turning 10, and everyone is invited. Expect a day full of free classes on the grounds of the studio.
- December 11 Yogeswari, an advanced certified Jivamukti teacher, will be visiting the studio.
- February 2, 2018 Bodytree will host its 4th annual yoga market.
UAE WARRIORS RESULTS
Featherweight
Azouz Anwar (EGY) beat Marcelo Pontes (BRA)
TKO round 2
Catchweight 90kg
Moustafa Rashid Nada (KSA) beat Imad Al Howayeck (LEB)
Split points decision
Welterweight
Gimbat Ismailov (RUS) beat Mohammed Al Khatib (JOR)
TKO round 1
Flyweight (women)
Lucie Bertaud (FRA) beat Kelig Pinson (BEL)
Unanimous points decision
Lightweight
Alexandru Chitoran (ROU) beat Regelo Enumerables Jr (PHI)
TKO round 1
Catchweight 100kg
Marc Vleiger (NED) beat Mohamed Ali (EGY)
Rear neck choke round 1
Featherweight
James Bishop (NZ) beat Mark Valerio (PHI)
TKO round 2
Welterweight
Abdelghani Saber (EGY) beat Gerson Carvalho (BRA)
TKO round 1
Middleweight
Bakhtiyar Abbasov (AZE) beat Igor Litoshik (BLR)
Unanimous points decision
Bantamweight
Fabio Mello (BRA) beat Mark Alcoba (PHI)
Unanimous points decision
Welterweight
Ahmed Labban (LEB) v Magomedsultan Magomedsultanov (RUS)
TKO round 1
Bantamweight
Trent Girdham (AUS) beat Jayson Margallo (PHI)
TKO round 3
Lightweight
Usman Nurmagomedov (RUS) beat Roman Golovinov (UKR)
TKO round 1
Middleweight
Tarek Suleiman (SYR) beat Steve Kennedy (AUS)
Submission round 2
Lightweight
Dan Moret (USA) v Anton Kuivanen (FIN)
TKO round 2
Test
Director: S Sashikanth
Cast: Nayanthara, Siddharth, Meera Jasmine, R Madhavan
Star rating: 2/5
Specs
Engine: Dual-motor all-wheel-drive electric
Range: Up to 610km
Power: 905hp
Torque: 985Nm
Price: From Dh439,000
Available: Now
'Midnights'
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The specs
Engine: 2.4-litre 4-cylinder
Transmission: CVT auto
Power: 181bhp
Torque: 244Nm
Price: Dh122,900
