A seething report on the explosive state of affairs in Britain, highlighting Blair's alliance with Washington and Bush's losing war on terror.

“Milton's Satan is morally very superior to his God, as whoever perseveres despite adversity and torture is superior to whoever, in cold Vengeance, takes the most horrible revenge on his enemies.” - Herman Melville On July 7th, the murderous mayhem that Blair's war has sown in Iraq came home to London in a devastating series of suicide bombings. Two weeks later, with apparent impunity, security forces shot dead a young Brazilian electrician on his way to work. Rough Music is Tariq Ali's white-hot response to these events. He lays bare the vengeful platitudes of Blair's war on civil liberties, mounts a scorching attack on the cosy falsehoods of the government's 'consensus' on what the threat amounts to and how to respond, and denounces the corruption of the political-media bubble which allows it to go unchallenged. Finally, invoking the perseverance and integrity of the great dissenters of the past, he calls for political resistance, within parliament and without.

Tariq Ali is a writer, and filmmaker, long time political activist and campaigner, very much in demand as a commentator on the current situation in the Middle East. He has written over a dozen books on world history and politics including the recent bestsellers, The Clash of Fundamentalisms and Bush in Babylon, five novels, and scripts for both stage and screen. The first novel of the Islam Quintet, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, was awarded the Archbishop San Clemente del Instituto Rosalia de Castro Prize for Best Foreign Language Fiction published in Spain in 1994 and, like the Book of Saladin, has been translated into several languages.