Nicolas Tredell

Yes, Fred Inglis’s biography of Raymond Williams is a bad book, marred by inaccuracies, obtuse and obtrusive opinionation, and inept attempts at ‘imaginative’ writing. But to focus on these flaws, as Raphael Samuel does in his review, or to seek to restore the hagiolatry, as some of your subsequent correspondents have done, is to obfuscate the larger issues which the biography undoubtedly –...

Terry Eagleton’s review of Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues (LRB, 7 March) is an intriguing performance: a strange mélange of patronising praise – Hall as the colonial immigrant who turns out to be plus anglais que les anglais – and of ignorant polemicising against Post-Modernism. The review turns, inevitably, into an indictment of Eagleton himself: for could it not once have been said of him...

Yes, Fred Inglis’s biography of Raymond Williams is a bad book, marred by inaccuracies, obtuse and obtrusive opinionation, and inept attempts at ‘imaginative’ writing. But to focus on these flaws, as Raphael Samuel does in his review, or to seek to restore the hagiolatry, as some of your subsequent correspondents have done, is to obfuscate the larger issues which the biography undoubtedly –...