Although C. L. R. James (1901–89) was born and raised in Trinidad, he spent more than half of his adult life in England. Christian Høgsbjerg's engaging biographical study focuses on James's political and intellectual development between 1932 and 1938, a period in which he took up the cause of Pan-Africanism and embraced the tenets of Marxism. During this six-and-a-half-year sojourn, James mainly lived in London, although he toured the country as a cricket correspondent and stayed for several months in Nelson, Lancashire, with his friends Learie and Norma Constantine. He arrived a promising young writer of fiction; by the time he departed for the United States, he was an accomplished historian, polemicist, and public speaker. While there is already an abundant secondary literature on James's life and work, Høgsbjerg has unearthed a great deal of fascinating and hitherto unknown material on James's trajectory during the so-called Red Decade. The result is one of the most stimulating biographies of a leftist anglophone intellectual to be published in recent years.

By any measure James was intensely productive during this period. In addition to writing on cricket for the Manchester Guardian and the Glasgow Herald, he wrote articles and pamphlets on the case for West Indian independence and spoke widely on the topics of colonialism and anti-colonialism. He translated Boris Souvarine's groundbreaking biography of Stalin and served as the ghostwriter for Learie Constantine's Cricket and I (1933). He also produced three historical studies: World Revolution, 1917–1936 (1937), a detailed critique of Soviet foreign policy; A History of Negro Revolt (1938); and The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), which has remained in print since its original publication and which is perhaps his best known book. From the standpoint of sheer literary output, this was probably the most generative period of James's long life, but he was also highly involved in grassroots politics. For example, he was active in the League of Coloured Peoples, the International African Friends of Abyssinia, and the International African Service Bureau, where he worked alongside such notable figures as George Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta, Chris Braithwaite, and Amy Ashwood Garvey. In addition, for nearly two years he chaired the Finchley branch of the Independent Labour Party, and he subsequently played a leadership role in a small Trotskyist organization called the Marxist Group. He edited the Marxist Group's newspaper, Fight, and participated in the founding convention of the Fourth International.

Høgsbjerg ably summarizes this record of achievement and places it in a larger social and cultural context. He is deeply knowledgeable about the English left, about the early history of Trotskyism, and about the ways in which James's interests and commitments intersected with various circles, tendencies, movements, and parties. Høgsbjerg is principally concerned with the events, people, and ideas that helped propel James in the direction of revolutionary socialist politics, but he is also interested in the anticolonial dimension of James's life and work as well as in the nuanced relationship between his Pan-Africanism and his class politics. Høgsbjerg's extensive research in the relevant archives and his tenacious efforts to speak to the remaining individuals who knew James in this period have yielded a much more fine-grained sense of James's day-to-day activities in the 1930s than any previous biographical study. In addition, he clearly has a “feel” for the game of cricket and for why it was so important to James, something that has eluded most US writers (this reviewer very much included). And while his account emphasizes James's political views, publications, and intellectual development, he discloses interesting bits and pieces about James's friendships, cultural pursuits, and romantic liaisons. Anyone with an interest in literary London, anticolonial protest, or interwar radical politics will enjoy this insightful, factually grounded, yet thematically rich biography.

It is worth noting that Høgsbjerg recently edited and wrote the introduction to a de facto companion volume to the book under review: Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History (Durham, NC, 2013). This book features the long-lost original script for James's three-act dramatization of the life of Toussaint Louverture, which was staged at the Westminster Theatre in London in 1936, with Paul Robeson in the starring role. It also includes the original theatrical program, a sampling of the correspondence between James and Robeson, and nearly two dozen contemporary reviews of James's play. In addition, Høgsbjerg has produced a fine monograph on the Barbadian activist Chris Braithwaite (1885–1944), Mariner, Renegade & Castaway: Chris Braithwaite; Seamen's Organiser, Socialist and Militant Pan-Africanist, which was co-published in 2013 by Redwords and the London-based Socialist History Society.