Owen Jones is the author of Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, which will be published in June by Verso. www.owenjones.org

Just William
Richmal Crompton
First published 1922

I used to escape at lunchtime from my primary school and lead a whole gang of kids to Heston library, where I discovered William, the eternal anarchist. It was during the war but we didn’t think much about bombs or even about the ‘Nasties’, as William called them. When I was evacuated to Nottingham, there was always William to ease my longing to return to the London of the doodlebugs. He lived with me through the war and still makes me chuckle quietly to myself when I am sad.

Moominsummer Madness
Tove Jansson
First published 1954
This is my favourite of the wonderful Tove Jansson’s Moomin books. It starts with a huge flood. With the waters rising, the Moomins see a house with the front door missing floating towards them. It is huge, and they jump on board. Gradually you become aware that the house is in fact a theatre and comes complete with Emma, a grumpy stage manager. It ends with a show, which the Moomins put on for the small animals thereabouts. All jaded actors and directors should read this book.

100 shorter poems
Publisher long forgotten
This was one of my father’s few books. Some inspired teacher must have given it to him and he could recite several of the poems by heart. Later I too had an inspired teacher, who used to write poems on sheets of cardboard, decorate them and lay them out in front of the class. Anyone who finished their work early could choose a poem, learn and recite it. I eventually married a poet, and sometimes think that my father’s little anthology and Miss Mizen’s clever reward system gave me the extraordinary gift of a lifetime of love and happiness.

Wings and the Child
Edith Nesbit
First published 1913
Edith Nesbit was an extraordinary woman who wrote for children in a language they could understand at a time when most such writing had a conservative moral and political bias. Her belief in the power of the imagination, the way she talked of children as real people with their own identities, her sense of humour and her exciting stories all mark her out as a very special writer. This glorious, affirmative book is a reminder that the world is full of wonders.

Plats du jour
Primrose Boyd and Patience Gray
Penguin 1957
One day my French professor invited me for a meal at the Normandy Hotel. It was one of the best turns anyone ever did for me. I learnt the importance of eating properly. Later, when I began to cook myself, I tried to recreate the wonderful cassoulet and salade vert I so enjoyed that evening. And the book that seemed to have all the information and enthusiasm to help me with my culinary attempts, and has stayed with me since, is this little Penguin, so delightfully illustrated by David Gentleman.

Tynan on Theatre
Kenneth Tynan
Penguin
Ken Tynan’s reviews made us leap out of bed on Sundays to get the Observer, and this book contains some of the most important writing about the transformation in British theatre, from Rattigan to Osborne. My late husband Adrian and I met in the office of the BBC’s Tempo arts programme when Ken was its editor; I was a researcher and Ken wanted Adrian to write a script. From then on Ken was a good friend and a loyal supporter. He commissioned Adrian to write Tyger, a play about Blake with music by Mike Westbrook that was done by the National Theatre. And he never hesitated to defend it from its very right-wing critics.

Who Killed Dylan Thomas?
Adrian Mitchell, Ralph Steadman
Ty Llen Publications
This is a lecture given by Adrian in Swansea when he was a happy Dylan Thomas Fellow for a month in1995. It is not a conventional lecture, more a collection of thoughts on poetry and a collage of poems and letters. Adrian sent the manuscript to Ralph Steadman to ask if he could use Ralph’s portrait of Dylan. Ralph sent it back having drawn all over the pages and it was subsequently printed in book form.
It describes the constant struggle to exist that eventually killed Dylan. At the end Adrian writes: ‘Artists can sometimes survive without public help. But do you want art to survive? Or do you want art to flourish?’

The actress and long-time activist Celia Hewitt (Mitchell) runs the Ripping Yarns second-hand bookshop in Highgate, north London, which specialises in children’s and illustrated books

Equality
R H Tawney 1931
Unwin Books
This book, probably more than any other, made me realise what democratic socialism meant and why it was important. It’s a marvellous account of the intellectual and philosophical underpinning of the European left over the past 80 years. And its central thesis is that the ‘freedom from’ is a necessary precondition for the exercise of the ‘freedom to’: the freedom from want, disease, hunger, poverty, idleness or discrimination having to be secured before the freedom to do things, seize opportunities or achieve successes can be delivered. It’s a book I would prescribe as required reading for anyone aspiring to be a progressive MP.

No Ordinary Time
Doris Kearns Goodwin 1994
Simon Schuster
Doris Kearns Goodwin has become an indefatigable chronicler of American politics and history, and this is her best book – an account of the life, challenges and decisions of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House. It’s a fascinating story of the noble ideals and grubby compromises that combine together in any great political endeavour. It shows us exactly what torments and triumphs Barack Obama is enduring, right now.

Ring of Bright Water
Gavin Maxwell 1960
Penguin
I loved this book when I first read it as a teenager. I still do. It’s the tale of someone who renovates a tumbledown cottage by the sea on the west coast of Scotland and shares his life there with two otters. Its evocation of the land and seascape, the rhythm of the seasons, its perceptions about the natural world, its empathy with the lives of animals, its hilarious stories of adventure and accident and tragedy, are perfectly done. Maxwell quotes a Louis MacNeice poem at the end that says ‘thank you … for making this life worth living’; and it is indeed a book infused with the spirit of life.

Undiscovered Scotland
W H Murray 1951
Diadem
Bill Murray was one of the formidable group of mid-20th century Scottish mountaineers. He wrote his first book, Mountaineering in Scotland, in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany and after it was confiscated had to write it all over again. This is the sequel, and for someone like me, who has spent a lifetime tramping the hills and glens of Scotland, it is a perfect gem. It is passionate about the beauty of the hills and mountains; it captures the sense of the infinite that lies beyond the landscape; it reminds us, deep down, why we love this wild and wonderful country.

King Lear
William Shakespeare 1608
Methuen (Arden Shakespeare)
Lear is the darkest of Shakespeare’s tragedies. The play tears at our hearts, brings rage and pity, exposes the elemental forces of all our natures, renders us baffled and exhausted by folly and cruelty alike, and does it all in words that are unsurpassed. We emerge from the play feeling as if our emotions and understanding have been wrung dry. A critic once wrote that the catharsis at the end of Lear doesn’t come because we know that good has triumphed over evil – it hasn’t – but because we know ‘that it is better to have been Cordelia than to have been her sisters’.

Wetlands
Charlotte Roche
Fourth Estate, 2009
Set in a hospital, Wetlands follows the thoughts and strange encounters of 18-year-old Helen Memel, the victim of an unfortunate attempt at intimate shaving. It is hard not to see Charlotte Roche’s rebellion against the unwritten demand that women be (mostly) hairless, constantly presentable and perpetually desirable as, in part, an attack on the television culture that made her name (Roche is a TV star in Germany).
Helen is everything a female TV host cannot be: ill, self-involved and obsessed with obscenity. But Wetlands is more than just a complaint against the sexual double standards of contemporary life. It points to an odd paradox: for all the hedonism of an apparently liberated culture in which women can drink and screw with the best of them (think Sex and the City), the language we use to describe this behaviour and these unleashed desires is profoundly outdated or, more often, simply absent.

The Dialectic of Sex
Shulamith Firestone
HarperCollins, 1970
A visionary account of woman’s historical oppression (what Firestone calls ‘sex-class’, which underlies economic class) and of how technology will bring about what she calls ‘cybernetic communism’, the complete emancipation of women from childbirth and the negative dimensions of female embodiment. Firestone is unusual for making sexual difference her starting point (as opposed to starting with the ‘constructed’ nature of gender, for example), but gives us a vital indication as to how serious and wide-ranging feminism can be.

Heartbreak: The Political Memoirs of a Feminist Militant
Andrea Dworkin
Continuum, 2002
Dworkin was a brilliant, crystalline writer. Whatever disagreements you may have with her positions (her campaign against pornography, for example), there is no doubting the strength and the rigour of her arguments, as well as the passion for her cause. Heartbreak is a short, compelling book that details, often in a humorous way, her encounters with injustice in childhood, adolescence and then as a campaigning and outspoken adult. Her white-hot anger against violence towards women in all its forms burns from the page.

King Kong Theory
Virginie Despentes
Serpent’s Tail, 2009
This is a half-polemic, half-memoir in which French filmmaker and writer Despentes takes to task French hypocrisy about sex and her own experiences of prostitution. She writes that undesirable women ‘have always existed. We just never feature in novels written by men, who only create women they want to have sex with. … Even today, when women publish lots of novels, you rarely get female characters that are unattractive or plain, unsuited to loving men or to being loved by them.’ It is an angry cry for the recognition of sidelined women everywhere.

The Piano Teacher
Elfriede Jelinek
Serpent’s Tail, 1999
Jelinek explores the darker regions of the female psyche and sexual desire, linking repression and perversity to broader social and political conditions. The book is about the self-destruction of sexually repressed Erika Kohut, a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory. But it is also about obsession, desire and having a weird relationship with your mother. It frightens, but in a good way.

Little Tales of Misogyny
Patricia Highsmith
Norton, 2002
Highsmith, a gay, drunk crime writer who famously hated women but couldn’t live without them, had a tough, eerie style that generated true psychological anti-heroes. In this short story collection, a Women’s Lib meeting ends in murder at the hands of a can of beans, marriage ends in an arranged heart attack for the husband and little girls grow up far too quickly into back-stabbing women. Highsmith’s refusal to ‘play nice’ is her greatest strength.

Smile or Die
Barbara Ehrenreich
Granta, 2009
Ehrenreich addresses class, employment, gender and in Smile or Die, a history of the self-help industry. Her first real encounter with this billion-dollar hot-air cloud comes through her own experience of breast cancer and exhortations to ‘think positive’. She points out that if we spent more time looking for a cure, rather than demanding sufferers go on a ‘personal journey’, then we might not need so many pink ribbons.

Nina Power is the author of One Dimensional Woman and blogs at infinitethought.cinestatic.com

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Puffin. First published 1908

I have always been bookish. I was brought up in a working class home and my father took me to the library every week. He was an avid reader and we would come back weighed down with our spoils. Most of my favourites had as their central character a girl who was strong and feisty and was valued in the end for being smart rather than beautiful! Anne was one of those. The book meant something special because I was given it as a prize and my mother, who had left school at 14 and rarely had time for the indulgence of reading, was thrilled when I brought it home. She wistfully remembered it from when she was at school and she read it again. Sharing it with her meant so much to me and I still love discussing books with other people. It’s like sharing food.

Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck

Penguin. First published 1939

The few books of our own we had at home were either good Catholic stories about the saints and martyrs or leftish books belonging to my father. They lived on a little bookshelf attached to a bureau, which was my mother’s prized piece of furniture. The books were novels by American authors like Jack London, Howard Fast and John Steinbeck, which my father had read when he was young and reflected his own political leanings. I read Grapes of Wrath when I was 13 and I was enraged at the way the bankers and big corporations exploited the farmers, driving them into destitution. We were a Labour family, but it was reading that put flesh on the bones of my socialism.

Letters from Prison

Antonio Gramsci

Columbia Univ Press 1994

I think Gramsci is one of the most important political figures of the 20th century. Through him I came to understand how people consent to their own oppression. We only have to look around now to see how his concept of cultural hegemony works so effectively. The values of a particular class become the ‘common-sense’ values of all and ordinary folk identify their own good with that of the rich.

The Women’s Room

Marilyn French

Virago. First published 1977

The 1970s produced many great feminist books – novels and political analysis about patriarchy, entrenched inequality and double sexual standards. Marilyn French made it all come alive in the pages of her novel. My courtroom experience was what blew open my own real understanding of the way women suffered multiple disadvantages in a society that was organised from the perspective of men.

Staying Alive

ed Neil Astley

Bloodaxe 2002

I have always loved poetry and read it regularly for pleasure. I like how a few words can be so expressive of profound emotion. This is a wonderful anthology and it includes some work of a friend, Mary Oliver, one of the great contemporary American poets.

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad

Penguin. First published 1899

This is the book to read about colonialism and racist exploitation. It tells the story of Marlow, who is commissioned to go to the Congo to bring back the disappeared Kurtz, a key figure in a European company that is sucking the natural resources out of central Africa. All the justifications for colonial occupation are rehearsed – bringing ‘civilisation’ to the natives. Now we describe it as bringing ‘democracy’. The film Apocalypse Now was a contemporary rendition of the tale. An unforgettable book.

A People’s History of the
United States

Howard Zinn

Harper Perennial. First published 1980

Howard Zinn was one of the truly great men of America. He died recently, still a socialist and campaigner. His history of the United States is a challenge to the patriotic jingoism that mutes the horror stories of what happened to native Americans and slaves, the nightmare of McCarthyism and Jim Crow laws, the shame of his country’s role in Vietnam and South America. However, this is no ‘self-hating’ American Jew. He tells the wonderful true stories of America’s greatness – the former welcome to the world’s huddled masses fleeing persecution, the struggles by ordinary people for trade union rights and by black people for civil rights. All his books are inspirational but this is the one that everyone should read.

The Trial

Franz Kafka

Penguin. First published 1925

Some books have eternal truths and should be revisited at regular intervals. This is one of them. My life as a trial lawyer has made me a firm believer in open processes with a jury of ordinary people hearing the evidence. Over many years I have done a large amount of terrorist work but this is the worst time I have ever known for injustice. Currently, control order cases and hearings to deport people are frequently heard in secret. Neither the detainees nor their lawyers of choice get to hear the evidence against them. Special advocates hear the secret evidence but are not allowed to discuss it with the detainee. Kafka is dead. Long live Kafka.

Helena Kennedy QC is a leading barrister and expert in human rights law and civil liberties

A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens, Wordsworth Editions (first published 1859)
Lawyer Sydney Carton is dissolute and unlovable. But twice he saves the day for Charles Darnay, an undercover member of the aristocracy who resembles him in appearance. In the early part of the book he secures his acquittal in a terrorism trial at the Old Bailey and at the end he performs an act of supreme sacrifice in substituting himself for Charles at the guillotine of the French Revolution. As novels about lawyers go, I prefer this one to the more commonly chosen To Kill a Mockingbird.

Erewhon

Samuel Butler, Penguin Classics (first published 1872)

A traveller arrives in a country where criminals are regarded as being ill and the sick are treated as criminals. A form of doctor known as a ‘straightener’ arrives to flog a man ‘ill’ of embezzling money, while a bout of stealing socks is a polite social excuse and a man dying of consumption pleads his innocence of disease. Written in the 19th century – before Brecht, Kafka or Saramago.

The Master and Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov, Vintage Classics (first published 1967)

Banned by Stalinist Russia, this book was only published many years after the author’s death in 1940. It interweaves chapters about Pontius Pilate with a fantastical tale of a magician who is Satan in disguise and his retinue, which includes a talking black tomcat. A satire of politics, religion and reality whose multiple meanings fascinate on every re-read.

Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful

Alan Paton, Penguin 1983

Written 30 years after his other masterpiece Cry the Beloved Country, this novel explores passionately – but also with irony – the fight against apartheid in South Africa. Particularly telling for me was the description of the way in which laws such as the Group Areas Act were used to legitimise injustice. The book tells the story of people, from a schoolgirl to a station master, who come up against these laws and fight back.

Daniel Deronda

George Eliot, Wordsworth Classics (first published 1876)

I love all George Eliot’s novels, but this one, which was her last, is courageous as one of the first literary denunciations of the dehumanising effects of racism. Daniel Deronda has to come terms with his discovery that he is Jewish and confront the anti-semitism of the time. Gwendolen Harleth, the heroine, marries for power rather than love and suffers the consequences.

Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics, 1948-1998

Harold Pinter

Faber and Faber 1998

I met Harold through Red Pepper and spoke alongside him at Red Pepper meetings. This book (my copy of which he signed for me) includes his reflections on the arrest of Kurdish actors rehearsing his play Mountain Language and the seizure by police of the toy guns hired from the National Theatre, a case of reality mimicking art. My firm sued the police for the actors – we were disappointed when the police settled it as we were looking forward to calling Harold as a witness in the trial. Harold’s plays and writing reflect his deep understanding of oppression and tyranny in all their manifestations.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers, Penguin Modern Classics (first published 1940)

Deaf-mute John Singer makes friends with a cast of characters in the Deep South of the US in the 1930s. Full of humanity, this novel is a heartfelt plea for lonely people who are mistreated and marginalised by an uncaring society and for the human need for the love of others.

Louise Christian is a civil liberties and human rights lawyer, and her selections can be purchased here.

A portion of the sales from purchases made through Red Pepper/Eclector’s book store contribute money to Red Pepper. Not all titles are available.

Joyce came into my life in 1951, when I was 16, in the shape of Ulysses, which I read in sixth form as an optional vacation assignment, and which gave me my first deep introduction to literary modernism and literary Ireland. Both have printed their mark on me ever since. Stream of consciousness was my preferred form of prose for several years – I even used it in the French essay paper for A-level. I can’t think of a better writer in English than Joyce, and the mighty, comic, endlessly inventive Ulysses is probably his best work.

The Making of the English Working Class
E P Thompson
Penguin, new ed 2002

I read this in the early 1960s, around the time it was published – and the time I met Edward at a New Left summer school in west Yorkshire. The book and the man became close friends thereafter. No book has made a deeper impression on my sensibility; no book has enabled me to see my own life and history more clearly. What separates it from most social history is its command of language and – for want of a better word – its poetry. Discussing historical movements and people who ended up getting the future wrong, he argues we must ‘rescue them from the enormous condescension of posterity’. Precisely.

The Country and the City
Raymond Williams
Oxford University Press, 1975

A long, painstaking and beautiful examination of English literature in the search for shifting images of ‘country’ and ‘city’ through history and the often class-freighted and ahistorical meanings we give them. I challenge anyone to read his first chapter and not be eager to go on. As with Joyce and Irishness, so Williams with Welshness: two national cultural elements in my own background that have resonated within my own thought and work.

Slaughterhouse 5
Kurt Vonnegut
Vintage, new ed 1991

For me one of the most important English-language novels of the 20th century, Slaughterhouse 5 tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, a US soldier who survives the Dresden bombings and becomes ‘unstuck in his time’, living his life in a random order and repetitively. It combines an extraordinary realism with a wild and dangerous delight that possessed me in the 1970s and beyond like a virus and still hangs on, unshakable, in my writing and thinking and feeling. Years later, trying to write The Gulf Between Us, about three Brit workers trapped in Baghdad during the first Iraq War, I slowly realised it came straight from Kurt Vonnegut. I challenge anyone to read the final chapter and not weep.

Camera Lucida
Roland Barthes
Vintage, new ed 1993

As the 1970s’ promise of a scruffy utopia gave way to the buffed dystopia of the 1980s, I decided to look for a second (shorter) creative form and lighted on photography, a search that brought me face to face with Barthes’ masterpiece. Ostensibly a philosophical analysis of photography, it resolves halfway through into a deep and painful examination of Barthes’ long dependent relationship with his recently dead mother. No one of a certain age can read this book and not feel a memoir coming on.

The Rattle Bag
Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney (eds)
Faber and Faber, 2005

Five hundred and more poems from four corners and five continents make up the best poetry anthology you’ll ever encounter. I send copies of it out each Christmas; and there are three copies strewn about the house in case I feel a sudden need of it. In the words of the editors: ‘This anthology amassed itself like a cairn … each poem full of its singular appeal, transmitting its own signals, taking its chances in a big voluble world.’ A gem.

A Life in Letters
Anton Chekhov
Penguin Classics, 2004

I’ve been reading Chekhov (letters, stories, plays) since the 70s, when Richard Eyre bought me his Selected Letters as companion on my travels into my new English version of The Cherry Orchard. This new volume, much enlarged and with excellent notes in a brilliant translation, confirms that Chekhov is in the first rank of writers, thinkers and human beings.

The Angel of History
Carolyn Forché
HarperPerennial, reprint 1995

Forché is the founder of a movement known as Poetry of Witness. Some years ago I encountered her work (Gathering the Tribes, The Country Between Us, Against Forgetting) and knew at once it was important and would last. The Angel of History, published in the mid-90s, is a scarifying account of the bloody horrors that are the 20th century: war, genocide, holocaust, nuclear destruction; but one filled with love and tenderness and a warm awareness of the smallness of things. These are poems that make the earth a better place.

Radical playwright Trevor Griffiths’ A New World: A Life of Tom Paine was at the Globe theatre this summer and his Comedians at the Lyric last month

This is a book about courage. The writer showed tremendous guts by writing it. There is a black man in the White House, yet mostly black men in prisons in the USA. George Jackson was sentenced from one year to life for stealing $72 from a gas station. He spent ten years inside (seven years in solitary confinement), and was eventually killed in a prison riot. His writings are an articulation of isolation and determination not to be chained to his past, teaching himself the language of his ancestors and expressing his love for his family and friends.

The Essential Lenny Bruce

edited by John Cohen, Ballantine 1967

This made me laugh out loud. It’s a book that uses humour like no other; before reading it I never knew laughter could be so serious. Lenny Bruce is dead. Long before ‘alternative comedy’, he broke taboos. Charged with obscenity, he wouldn’t give in. Here was proof that we could sit with those we loved and lie to them. Another death in the custody of convention.

Sirius

Olaf Stapleden, Secker & Warburg 1944

This is science fiction as it’s supposed to be. I loved sci-fi books in my teens and Olaf Stapleden uses this genre like no other. A British scientist bioengineers a dog of human intelligence and raises it as one of the children. Sirius’ relationship with his human sister, Plaxy, has all the elements of family life, yet he is isolated from his kind. Loneliness, pathos and instinct over thought, a very human story.

Coming Up For Air

George Orwell, Penguin Classics, new edition 2001

This is Orwell’s forgotten classic. Despite some of his funny ways, Orwell is one of the best and clearest writers I’ve ever come across. In this book, George ‘fatty’ Bowling decides, because of a bit of luck, winning on a horse, to visit Lower Binfield. He tries to recapture the days of his youth. Set in 1938, war was approaching. Orwell foresaw that war was inevitable with Hitler in power. He captures the childhood feeling of not being in a hurry, the warmth, happiness and security, but he finds that there is no going back physically or emotionally; we are prisoners of the present, hemmed in by our memories.

The Dispossessed

Ursula Le Guin, Harper & Row 1974

Trying swearing without using profanities or sex being dirty – one of the thoughts that have stuck with me since reading the book. Le Guin was attempting to work out how an anarchist society would function, inspired by the work of the anarchist and pacifist, Paul Goodman. I’ve read this book at least four times and I learn more every time.

The Invention of the Human

Harold Bloom, Fourth Estate 1998

Croxteth was a great place to be in the 1960s; St Swithen’s didn’t do culture for us ‘Bash Street Kids’. Alf Riley led me to Shakespeare’s plays. Bloom suggests that Shakespeare invented the human character. Alf would have loved it. A raw egg, a banana, a cup of tea ‘says he was ambitious, if it were so, it was a grievous fault …’ Alf’s quotes from Shakespeare led me to this. Shakespeare wrote for everyone, he was a man for every person.

The Art of Loving

Erich Fromm, Harper & Row 1956

Despite the title this is a book not about sex but about the human condition. Coping with disappointment, the biggest of which is that we die before or after those we love. Every impulse and action trying to escape the prison that is self. We search for oceanic feelings. Love is the active – we find our being through what we do, not how we feel.

Revolution in the Head

Ian McDonald, Fourth Estate 1994

A book that will tell you about an aborted revolution. It made me love the Beatles more than I already did. Two sisters going to the Cavern meant nothing. The Beatles at Shea stadium switched me on to the soundtrack of the 1960s. McDonald’s book analyses every Beatle song in detail. Music matters, and is more precise than words. He gives an overview of the 1960s, how the right triumphed and what the music meant. All art is discovery.

Billy Hayes is general secretary of the Communications Workers Union, and his selections can be purchased here.

A portion of the sales from purchases made through Red Pepper/Eclector’s book store contribute money to Red Pepper. Not all titles are available.

Scramble for Africa manages to explain the psychology of those who now stand as statues all over Europe. Whether it’s Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill or Leopold across the sea, nationalistic intellectual commentators love to masturbate over the merits of these leaders – or worse, want their contributions to be part of the education system, indoctrinating the young in their misguided morality and views about the human race.
It was not long ago that the most vicious of empires slaughtered millions in Africa without any remorse. This book explains the competitive, evil nature of European leaders whose blood-drenched greed and capitalism went to such indecent levels.

The Travels of Ibn Battuta

Various editions

Travellers in general have been the servants of rulers with ulterior motives but here was one that genuinely consumed himself in the actual surroundings and an interest in people.

Armed with simplicity, Ibn Battuta crossed many continents, and his observations are full of curiosity and intrigue. A well-travelled person should be able to elevate himself from his ignorant opinions and explain not only the common, sometimes annoying, traits of humanity, but break down what bonds people together and how they bond.

Messages to the World: the statements of Osama Bin Laden

Bruce Lawrence (ed), Verso 2005

This is an encyclopedia of letters addressed to the leaders in the Arab world, from the man and the organisation that has changed our world this century. In them, he pleads for a change of direction away from subservience to the colonial and imperial powers.

The tragedy of 9/11 in all its epic proportions is not a far cry from the despair of not only the Muslim world but of many other corners of the world at the military and economic terrorism carried out by the West, in all its unquestioned acceptability. If nothing justifies the position of Osama Bin Laden, then the same rule must apply to states across the globe. This book shows that state terrorism is the catalyst for resistance, however uncomfortable that might be.

The telephone directory of Bradford, 1960 and 2009

The best way to study the changing face of Britain. Check out the phenomenon of white flight, not just in run-down areas but the more affluent areas.

We loved Mr and Mrs Wright and thought we would get married to Jane and Susan, their daughters, but now they live in Eccleshill and that’s a no-go area for us – we sent many invites for many years, but no response. Love you Susan, still!

While There is Light

Tariq Mehmood, Carcanet 2003

Tariq Mehmood chooses a crap title for a great semi-biography, as from his birthplace of Pakistan to Bradford, he is thrown into a world of insecurity and conflicts. This is essentially the story of Britain’s second generation Asians in the late 60s and early 70s, against a backdrop of racism and white rules. The regularity of physical attacks on Asians was too much to bear and the famous Bradford 12 took the law into their own hands, and rightly so. If the system was not going to stop the attacks then they were going to prepare the petrol bombs for the National Front. This is a fascinating story of a bunch of Asian anarchists who fought the law and won.

A Mirror to the Blind

Abdul Sattar Edhi, 1996

Together with his wife, Balquis, Abdul Sattar Edhi started the Edhi Charity foundation in Pakistan, which has since grown into a huge free health service. This book is full of the conviction of a person who stands absolute in the philosophy of charity, a duty not a plea. This man has seen it all yet keeps his focus on what is righteous.

The God Delusion

Richard Dawkins, Bantam 2006

The great hope of atheism fails miserably in attempting to convince us believers that we’ve got it all wrong. Mystics far greater than Dawkins, and less patronising, pondered these questions and died without finding the absolute answer. His Holiness Dawkins offers little but cheap attacks and absurd, fantasised egotistical assumptions. I think he wants to be God.

The Qur\’an

God

Many talk about it, insult it, burn it, flush it down toilets (Guantanamo), misrepresent it (Wilders), attempt to re-write it, abuse it, but they never READ IT for themselves. The Qur’an is not just for Muslims; it clearly throws down a gauntlet – so challenge the writings intellectually.

Aki Nawaz is a singer and musician. He is part of Fun-da-mental, a group that fuses left-wing politics, Islam, anti-racism and hip hop. His selections can be purchased here.

A portion of the sales from purchases made through Red Pepper/Eclector’s book store contribute money to Red Pepper. Not all titles are available.