In May 1976, the Jamaican-born cultural theorist Stuart Hall sat down in the BBC’s studios in West London to interview the Trinidadian-born intellectual C.L.R. James. They were being filmed by Mike Dibb, who had produced John Berger’s Ways of Seeing four years earlier, for a planned BBC Two broadcast commemorating James’s seventy-fifth birthday. Hall was forty-four. The conversation was a torch-passing of sorts, from one West Indian intellectual who made his name in Britain to another. The tape of that interview was lost before it was ever aired. More accurately, it was destroyed—wiped before transmission. That November the broadcasting executive Aubrey Singer circulated a surly, not to say ignorant, internal memo: “Sorry, but I have no interest in a 45” conversation with C.L.R. James.” The two men made a second attempt for Channel Four eight years later. The second session can still be watched online: Dibb filmed it in the Brixton flat where James saw out his days under the patronage of the racial justice advocate Darcus Howe. But by then James, at eighty-three, had begun to …