It is one of my regrets that I never had a chance to meet CLR James; we never met in a press box; we were never even in the same continent at the same time. When he died in 1989, Times (London) called him the ‘Black Plato’, but such comparisons merely served to diminish him. He was much too large to be squeezed into a single analogy.
Two of his books have been all-time favourites. Beyond a Boundary, the finest book on cricket and life, and The Black Jacobins, the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the only successful slave revolt in history when the small island of San Domingo (later, Haiti) triumphed over France, Britain, and Spain.
The Welsh writer John L. Williams has pulled together the various strands of this unusual personality, painting him with greatness not restricted exclusively to politics, art, music, literature, philosophy, activism, theatre or cricket, all areas where he was among the finest to have drawn breath, as theoretician, performer or critic. Williams celebrates the contradictions and consistencies of this astonishing man celebrated across so many fields in a recent biography, C L R James: A Life Beyond the Boundaries.
