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Brief Lives

C.L.R. James (1901-1989)

David Austin on the life in writing of a philosopher of the dispossessed, and cricket.

Cyril Lionel Robert James was born in Trinidad in 1901. His father, Robert James, was a schoolmaster, but it was from his mother, Ida Elizabeth, a voracious reader, that he developed his love of literature, and especially of William Makepeace Thackery’s Vanity Fair, which he once claimed had more influence upon him than Marx. He began reading the Bible at age four, and later gravitated towards Ancient Greek literature. It was a central part of the elite public school curriculum in the colonial Caribbean, often taught by Oxford and Cambridge graduates. As he confessed in his semi-autobiographical philosophical study of cricket, Beyond a Boundary, “I believe that if when I left school I had gone into the society of Ancient Greece I would have been more at home than ever I had been since.

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