In the '90s, he founded the Respect Is Burning parties in Paris and brought electronic acts like Daft Punk to Twilo, a now-defunct club in Chelsea.
During Tuesday's unrest, Malema supporters burned the party flag and threw rocks and bottles, while the police fired stun grenades and water cannons.
The "Bronx is Burning" Halloween party.
The Commonwealth prize-winning fiction, which was on the 1991 Booker shortlist, was proscribed mid-term after the student wing of the nativist Shiv Sena party burned copies to protest against the "obscene and vulgar language" and the allegedly derogatory remarks about the party, its leader Bal Thackeray and the locals of the state whose cause it claims to champion.
"It burned through the party," Thompson recalled.
In April, those roving bands of "chimeres" burned down one party's headquarters while the police did nothing to stop them.
On Wednesday, young activists of the nationalist Dashnaktsutyun party burned Turkish flags and led a 15,000-strong torch-lit procession in Yerevan.
That night, al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, a group linked to Mr Arafat's own Fatah party, burned down a PA security base in protest at Musa Arafat's appointment, while thousands of gunmen marched through the streets.
Angry supporters also took to the streets in Peshawar, while in Karachi shop owners quickly closed for business as activists from Bhutto's party burned tyres on the roads.
There was the famous fire when she lived on King Street, that Sigrid Nunez writes about in Siempre Susan: a fireplace in the next building burned through the party wall and coated the lower floor of Susan's duplex with soot.
