''This is a miracle of a book'' George Lamming''Compelling. Stuart Hall''s story is the story of an age'' Owen Jones ''Sometimes I feel I was the last colonial''This is the story, in his own words, of the extraordinary life of Stuart Hall: writer, thinker and one of the leading intellectual lights of his ageGrowing up in a middle-class family in 1930s Jamaica, then still a British colony, Hall found himself caught between two worlds: the stiflingly respectable middle class in Kingston, who, in their habits and ambitions, measured themselves against the white planter elite; and working-class and peasant Jamaica, neglected and grindingly poor, though rich in culture, music and history.But as colonial rule was challenged, things began to change in Jamaica and across the world.When, in 1951, a scholarship took him across the Atlantic to Oxford University, Hall encountered other Caribbean writers and thinkers, from Sam Selvon and George Lamming to VS. Naipaul. He also forged friendships wit