Martin Jacques

Background

Jacques was born in October 1945 in the city of Coventry (then in {Warwickshire, now in the West Midlands), and was brought up there.

Education

Jacques was educated at King Henry VIII School, an independent school in Coventry (at the time a partly fee-paying boys" direct grant grammar school), followed by the University of Manchester, where he graduated with a first-class Honours degree, and subsequently at King"s College at the University of Cambridge, where he studied for a Doctor of Philosophy.

Career

In this period, he was the co-editor or co-author of The Forward March of Labour Halted? He has been a columnist for The Times and The Sunday Times and was deputy editor of The Independent. Jacques is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre. He was a visiting professor at the International Centre for Chinese Studies at Aichi University in Japan, a visiting professor at Renmin University in Beijing and a senior visiting fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

Jacques" wife Harinder Kaur Veriah, a Malaysian lawyer, died in January 2000 aged 33 at Ruttonjee Hospital in Hong Kong after suffering epileptic fits and then cardiac arrest.

Her death led to the introduction of anti-racism laws in 2008. In 2009, Jacques" book about Asian modernity and the rise of China entitled When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order was published.

Jacques is a columnist for The Guardian and New Statesman.

Achievements

• Jacques was a co-founder of the think-tank Demos.

Politics

Jacques was editor of the Communist Party of Great Britain"s journal, Marxism Today, from 1977 until its closure in 1991. (1981), The Politics of Thatcherism (1983) and New Times (1989).