This page allows you to download PDFs of some long reads by Nancy and Jonathan,
from 10,000 words to book length. They include Cape Care, a memoir of his mother by Jonathan, Thank God We’re Secular: Gender, Islam and Turkish Republicanism by Nancy, The Class Politics of the Taliban by Nancy, Forecastle and Quarterdeck: Protest, Discipline and Mutiny in the Royal Navy by Jonathan, and Abortion Politics in the United States by both of us.

CAPE CARE: a memoir of my mother by Jonathan Neale. You can download Jonathan’s 121 page memoir about looking after his elderly mother, and about life, love and death. Or you can read in on the website here.

THANK GOD WE’RE SECULAR. Jonathan Writes: This is a treat. It’s the English translation of Thank God We’re Secular: Gender, Islam and Turkish Republicanism, by Nancy Lindisfarne with Richard Tapper. The book was originally published in Turkish by Iletisim in 2001. The book is in two parts. Part One, pages 1-150, has never been published in English before. Here Nancy develops an analysis of republicanism and Islamic practice in Turkey. This is, almost uniquely, an analysis that is historically grounded, fiercely feminist, solidly socialist and deeply sympathetic to the religious lives of ordinary Turks. Pages 151-400 are re-edited versions of previously published articles by Richard and Nancy that grew out of their joint fieldwork in a Turkish town in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

CLASS POLITICS AND THE TALIBAN. No one on the left, or anywhere else, writes much about the class basis of the Taliban. The exception is Nancy Lindisfarne. This is her chapter on “Exceptional Pashtuns? Class Politics, Imperialism and Historiography.” Starting from the example of the Pakistani Taliban in Swat, and working outwards, she presents some inconvenient facts. Nancy lays out evidence that the Taliban particularly on support from landless and small peasants, and that when they take control in a valley they drive out the landlords. Moreover, their leadership comes much more humble backgrounds than almost any other Islamist movement.

MUTINEERS. Here is Jonathan’s PhD thesis on Forecastle and Quarterdeck: Protest, Discipline and Mutiny in the Royal Navy, 1793-2014. Skip chapter 2, which is an outdated and boring survey of the literature. But the rest is full of cracking yarns.

OIL EMPIRES AND RESISTANCE. From 2015, this is Nancy and Jonathan’s history of Oil Empires and Resistance in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. It takes two or three hours to read, but it will give you solid background to the ongoing wars today. [The painting shows two guerillas in the Afghan resistance to the British in 1842.]

ABORTION POLITICS. Here is a grassroots history from below of Abortion Politics in the United States from 1964 to 2018 by Nancy and Jonathan. The focus is the lessons learned at each stage in the struggle. These are valuable lessons and we can use them to preserve abortion rights in the future. We make two central points. First, abortion rights were won by a mass movement, not the supreme court. Second, the abortion wars continue because abortion has come to stand for women’s equality, sexual freedom and desire. [The photo shows Judith Widdecombe, a pioneer underground abortion provider in St. Louis.]