SOURCE: Fountain, Nigel. “Summer's Here and the Time Is Right.” New Statesman 114, no. 2954 (6 November 1987): 28-9.

In the following review, Fountain describes Ali as an “informative, funny, and illuminating writer,” lauding his prose in Street Fighting Years.

Is it the right title? Mick Jagger joined the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign marchers as they moved on Grosvenor Square in March 1968 and, hey presto, two months later, out popped ‘Street Fighting Man’ and thus, I suppose, the cue for the title of Tariq Ali's autobiography [Street Fighting Years]. Yet brooding on his entertaining reminiscences of those times my mind slipped to a 1964 waxing by the West Coast's Beach Boys, who reported that they were getting tired of going down the same old strip and were going to find a new place where the kids were hip. There isn't really very much fighting in Street Fighting Years, but boy, Ali can—and does...