Letters from London

In 1932 CLR James left his home in Trinidad for the first time and sailed to the United Kingdom to fulfil his literary ambitions. He was 31 years old. During his first weeks in London he wrote a series of vigorously opinionated essays for the Port of Spain Gazette, giving his impressions of the great city and its inhabitants, and describing his progress through the Bohemian circles of Bloomsbury.



Letters from London collects these essays for the first time in seventy years. It is an essential record of a crucial period in James’s life. His London is an intellectual ferment of politics and poetry and all-night conversations in boarding-house rooms, peopled by radical young Englishmen and liberated young Englishwomen, and students from every reach of the British Empire.



As the education and manners of his colonial upbringing are tested in this heady atmosphere, we sense the emergence of the revolutionary CLR. James who was to become a major intellectual figure not just of the West Indies but of the world.