The author and activist Naomi Klein has just endured a gentle mauling on the Today programme. [1]

She was wearing dark jeans tucked into tall brown boots, a crisp white shirt, and a long black blazer. She was dressed for a fox hunt. She looked terrific.

She had spent the day curled up on the blue sofa in her living room, watching CNN while she waited restlessly to hear what would happen in Washington. She fortified herself with cups of coffee and a smoothie. [2]

Naomi Klein is the pre-eminent figure (she would deplore the term “leader”) in a worldwide protest movement against companies, free trade and global integration. [3] Ironically, for a woman who has been hailed as the author of a "Das Kapital of the growing anti-corporate movement", there's nothing grungy about Klein. With her sleek hair-cut, immaculate teeth and friendly but down-to-business attitude, she could easily be mistaken for a telecoms exec winding up a power breakfast in the lobby of a boutique hotel. [4]

Naomi spent her adolescence in her room writing poetry or experimenting in the bathroom with makeup. [Her mother] Bonnie was appalled. She worried that Naomi was turning into a brat, thinking about clothes, spending time in front of the mirror. “I think we were overly concerned about the kind of typical teen-age stuff she was into,” Bonnie says. “She read Judy Blume! I was beside myself. I was a feminist—I wanted my daughter to be good at math.” [5]

Naomi Klein, like most campus leftists of the 1980s, directed her ideological energies toward the denouncing of various -isms within academia. (She later recalled, with admirable remorse, that she was known as "Miss P.C.") By the 1990s, Klein had come to realize, like some other campus activists, that off-campus there could be found worse depredations than the canonization of Shakespeare and other dead white males. [6]

[1] Wheelwright, Julie. "Brainwashed by the market: What drives Naomi Klein?" The Independent, September 14, 2007. <http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/brainwashed-by-the-market-what-drives-naomi-klein-464231.html>

[2] MacFarquhar, Larissa. "Outside Agitator: Naomi Klein and the new new left." The New Yorker, December 8,  2008. <http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/08/081208fa_fact_macfarquhar>

[3] "Naomi Klein and her flawed brand of anti-brandism." The Economist, November 7, 2002.  <http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=1429429>

[4] "Brainwashed by the market: What drives Naomi Klein?"

[5] "Outside Agitator: Naomi Klein and the new new left."

[6] Chait, Jonathan. "Dead Left." The New Republic, July 30, 2008. <http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=69067f1c-d089-474b-a8a0-945d1deb420b>