Tariq Ali is a writer and a filmmaker. He has written five novels and over a dozen books on world history and politics. His latest is the acclaimed "The Clash of Fundamentalism: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity." he is currently writing "Bush in Babylon: Recolonizing Iraq." Howard Brenton was born in 1942 in Portsmouth, where his father was a policeman and a lay preacher. He had written several plays for the Royal Court, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the National Theatre before "Romans in Britain" (1980) was famously the cause of a failed prosecution by moral crusaders.
