"Both in the eloquence of his writing and the deep humanism of his vision, Mike Marqusee stands shoulder to shoulder with the spirits ofIsaac Deutscher andEdward Said."
Marqusee's first published work was the essay "Turn Left at Scarsdale", written when he was a sixteen-year-old high school student in New York and included in the 1970 collection "High School Revolutionaries".[3] Marqusee, who described himself as a "deracinated New YorkMarxist Jew", lived in Britain from 1971. He wrote mainly aboutpolitics,popular culture, theIndian sub-continent andcricket, and was a regular correspondent for, among others,The Guardian,Red Pepper, andThe Hindu. After he was diagnosed withmultiple myeloma in 2007, he wrote extensively on health issues, and in defence of theNational Health Service. His bookThe Price of Experience: Writings on Living with Cancer was published in 2014.[4]
An ardent sports fan, Marqusee won considerable renown for his work on cricket.War Minus the Shooting, his book on the1996 Cricket World Cup, has been lauded as a "riveting, revelatory and largely run-free account".[10] Rob Steen wrote that, before it was published, "observations of subcontinental cricket emanating from Britain, and just about every other corner of the so-called old world, tended to be clichéd, wrongheaded, derisive, patronising or just plain racist. Small wonder, then, that it took a London-based American with a rucksack, a notebook and aCLR Jamesian yen for Marxism to supply an overdue corrective."[10]Duncan Campbell ofThe Guardian wrote: "One of the best books ever written on cricket,Anyone But England, is by an American writer, Mike Marqusee."[11]
"Imperial whitewash - feelgood versions of British history are blinding us to the ways in which we are even now repeating it",The Guardian, 31 July 2006[12]
If I Am Not for Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew (Verso, 2008). An extract appeared inThe Guardian.[13]
"Why I became British" (The Guardian, 16 February 2010)[14]
"I don't need a war to fight my cancer" (The Guardian, 28 December 2009)[15]
Street Music: Poems (Clissold Books, 2012).
The Price of Experience: Writings on Living with Cancer (OR Books, 2014)
"Fifty years of Bob Dylan's stark challenge to liberal complacency" (The Guardian, February 2014).[16]