Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. He has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics-including The Clash of Fundamentalisms and The Extreme Centre-as well as five novels in his Islam Quintet series and scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of the New Left Review and lives in London.
Reading this book on your vacation will make your life better and your mind broader. -- Branko Milanovic Ali encourages the reader to take a fresh look at Lenin's choices in the context of a repressive autocracy, the poverty and misery of the bulk of the population under tsarism and the industrialised slaughter of the first world war. What underpins his book is the view that October was an innocent and utopian birth that was subsequently twisted into Stalinism by three devastating years of civil war. -- Daniel Beer * Guardian * A powerful tool for those wanting to understand the real Lenin and therefore the real politics behind those revolutionaries who fought so hard but ultimately failed in their goal. -- Lindsey German * Counterfire * [The Dilemmas of Lenin] aims to rescue Lenin from both liberal caricature and Soviet hagiography by recovering the realism and dynamism of his political thought. -- The New Republic * The New Republic *