John L Williams

Historian, revolutionary and cricket writer, CLR James was one of the truly radical voices of the twentieth century. Born in Trinidad in the final days of the Victorian era, he debated with Trotsky, played cricket with Constantine, was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, inspired Kwame Nkrumah, and was a profound influence on the British Black Power movement. And yet by the late 1970s, CLR James was all but forgotten. The books he had written over the past half century were nearly all out of print. There were a few circles in which his name rang a bell: serious students of Black history; obsessive cricket fans. But that was it. When he died in Brixton in 1989, CLR James was internationally famous - lauded as the greatest of Black British intellectuals: the 'Black Plato', according to The Times. The ideas he put forward in his own time - of the importance of identity alongside class, of rebellion coming from below, of the leading roles of Black people, women and youth in political struggle - have gradually made their way to the forefront of our political thinking. His two great books, The Black Jacobins and Beyond a Boundary, still have the power to change readers' understanding of the world today. But while CLR James's work has been much examined, his long and remarkable life story has often been overlooked. For the first time, in a biography full of original research, human drama and keen insight, John L. Williams unveils the rich and compelling story of an intellectual giant. In doing so, he firmly establishes the importance of CLR James for the twenty-first century - if Black Britain has had a presiding genius, it remains CLR James.

Historian, revolutionary and cricket writer, CLR James was one of the truly radical voices of the twentieth century. Born in Trinidad in the final days of the Victorian era, he debated with Trotsky, played cricket with Constantine, was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, inspired Kwame Nkrumah, and was a profound influence on the British Black Power movement. And yet by the late 1970s, CLR James was all but forgotten. The books he had written over the past half century were nearly all out of print. There were a few circles in which his name rang a bell: serious students of Black history; obsessive cricket fans. But that was it.When he died in Brixton in 1989, CLR James was internationally famous - lauded as the greatest of Black British intellectuals: the 'Black Plato', according to The Times.The ideas he put forward in his own time - of the importance of identity alongside class, of rebellion coming from below, of the leading roles of Black people, women and youth in political struggle - have gradually made their way to the forefront of our political thinking. His two great books, The Black Jacobins and Beyond a Boundary, still have the power to change readers' understanding of the world today.But while CLR James's work has been much examined, his long and remarkable life story has often been overlooked. For the first time, in a biography full of original research, human drama and keen insight, John L. Williams unveils the rich and compelling story of an intellectual giant. In doing so, he firmly establishes the importance of CLR James for the twenty-first century - if Black Britain has had a presiding genius, it remains CLR James.

In the summer of 1989 John Williams embarked on an epic journey through a deeply troubled USA. A right-wing Republican administration seemed bent on rolling back the advances of the civil rights era; the Supreme Court were partially reversing the Roe vs Wade ruling on abortion; criminals from the Central Park rapist to the serial killers Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacey were all over the news. Who did Williams turn to make sense of all this? America's crime writers - that's who. He talked to novelists like James Ellroy and Elmore Leonard, Sara Paretsky and James Lee Burke, and visited the places they write about, like Los Angeles and Detroit, Chicago and New Orleans. The result was an instant cult classic that remains deeply relevant today: both an incisive and funny travelogue and a revealing guide to the lives and works of America's finest crime writers, caught at their peak.

A rich examination of the cultural and political upheaval in Britain in the boiling hot summer of 1976

A rich examination of the cultural and political upheaval in Britain in the boiling hot summer of 1976

Bloody Valentine is the story of the murder of a young woman called Lynette White in the Cardiff docklands (aka Tiger Bay) on Valentine's Day 1988. It's also the story of the miscarriage of justice that came after, when three black men, 'the Cardiff Three', were wrongly convicted of her murder. It's a brutally frank tale of racism and police corruption, terrible misogynist violence and the grim realities of sex work. It's a book that got so close to the bone that the author was sued for libel by the police and received death threats from a variety of minor characters. It's an indelible portrait of life in the underbelly of Thatcher's Britain. This new edition includes an introduction and afterword bringing the extraordinary, unhappy saga up to date.

Eartha Kitt was a skinny, mixed-race woman with an odd, angular face, who seduced fifties white America into thinking that she was, in the words of Orson Welles, 'the most exciting woman in the world'. She could count Marilyn Monroe, T.S. Eliot, Prince Philip and Albert Einstein among her friends and admirers, and was almost able to forget she had once been a poor black girl from the Deep South. But her new persona was also a prison from which she found it impossible to escape. John L. Williams' moving and unsettling biography shows a star adrift in a bewildering new America torn apart by the Civil Rights movement. Shunned by many of her former friends, shocked by her country's insidious racism, and with a perilously fragile sense of her own identity, Eartha Kitt would pay the price that came from trying to be America's mistress.

John L. Williams draws on original research and interviews to provide a portrait of a young woman on the cusp of stardom, whose rise to fame was in many ways symbolic of a changing world.