From The Guardian:
The first thing you see – bump into actually – when you enter Martin Jacques's light, roomy top-floor flat next to Hampstead Heath, north London, is a table football game. Then you trip over two violins, a sitar and a collection of other musical instruments, and find yourself staring at three teeth on a coffee-table. The owner of all these objects, Jacques's 10-year-old son Ravi, is at school, but his presence is everywhere – in the trophies he has won for music, in his numerous books and toys, and in photographs: of him as a baby, and with his late mother, Harinder, who died when Ravi was 16 months old. An interview with Jacques is inevitably a threnody for his beloved Hari and a celebration of their son.
We are here to talk about Jacques's meaty new book on the rise of China and how that country's dominance will transform the world, but Hari's tragic death in 2000 – Jacques fights back tears when he talks about her – and the years of blackness he suffered after she died initially overwhelm our conversation. What is the fate of countries beside the torments of the soul?
Jacques met Hari on the Malaysian island of Tioman in 1993. He was 47, a former history lecturer who in the 1980s had transformed Marxism Today from a dry-as-dust academic journal into a racy political must-read. Life to that point had been work and communism: a string of degrees, an unsuccessful battle to reform the Communist party, and a brilliant refashioning of the magazine – a consolation prize for not being able to wrest real power from the hardliners in the party. Hari was 26, a Malaysian of Indian descent, a lawyer from a radical family, a comet flashing across Jacques's well-ordered universe.
“I fell in love within a few minutes of talking to her,” Jacques recalls. “There was something utterly compelling about Hari. When I met her, I knew I had met the person that my life was really about.”
More here.