“... of the human spirit, which there is no reason to believe he ever entirely abandoned. For Raymond Williams, Establishment-bred leftists who finally revert to type can be seen as cases of what he calls in Culture and Society ‘negative identification’. The dissident offspring of the upper middle class throws in his lot with the militant ...”

“... about it, as though the duffing-up were more important than dealing with Orwell’s own writing. Raymond Williams is taken behind the bike sheds for a particularly nasty going-over; repetition of another kind adds to the problem here, since the substance of this long section was first delivered at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival in 1999 (as the ...”

“... world, Collini finds, was always smaller than we like to think; meanwhile, both the Americans and Raymond Aron have imagined Britain as the place where the intellectual can live a happy and well-rewarded life. Collini’s book ought to put a stop to such fantasies. Not least among the virtues of Absent Minds is that it spares us another extended account of ...”

“... modernist rigour to his Celtic romanticism’. He was part of a left-wing circle that included Raymond Williams, D.J. Enright and Maurice Craig, a Northern Irishman who remembered Henderson as ‘very loud-voiced, very insistently Scottish, and constantly singing’. During the two years he spent in Cambridge before the Second World War bore him off ...”

“... well as to Bourdieu) to use the life to amend the theory. Perry Anderson has compared Bourdieu to Raymond Williams, another scholarship boy who turned into a social critic – and, however reluctantly, into a kind of social success. Surely there are further conclusions to be drawn from such stories – not least that lowly origins can themselves serve as ...”

“... of the suburbs. The later novels attempt more complex ‘connections’ (a term taken over from Raymond Williams’s account of Dickens in The Country and the City), but again in the direction of simplification: usually a version of the family romance (the re-connecting of parents with long-lost children and so forth). What they offer is a sentimental ...”

“... community associated with Richard Hoggart, Jeremy Seabrook and Steedman’s particular mentor, Raymond Williams. The childhood Steedman described was not cosy and hospitable but lonely, introverted and largely joyless. Her mother, a Lancashire weaver’s daughter, had fought against marginality and deprivation by moving to London, becoming a ...”

“... Thus his psychologist is Melanie Klein, not Julia Kristeva; and his philosopher is Bernard Williams, not you-know who. So, too, his prose at its worst recalls Raymond Williams, for whom, ideologically, he has no time. More pertinently, there are no jokes, or none that I can see. This gets to seem important as ...”

“... giving final form to the book that became The Rise of the Novel, again published in 1957; and that Raymond Williams was drafting the bulk of what became Culture and Society, submitted to the publisher in 1956, eventually published in 1958. These were Frank’s contemporaries and peers: all had served during the war; all had non-Oxbridge teaching posts ...”

“... In​ The Country and the City, Raymond Williams described the powerful attraction many people feel for the ‘knowable community’ of the rural past. We hope to find in such places, he wrote, a prelapsarian refuge from the world of today. One such refuge could be found in the novels of George Eliot, which are populated by cottagers, carpenters, farmers’ wives, lacklustre clergymen and Methodist preachers ...”

“... one between the pudendum muliebre and the pons asinorum? Ambrose Bierce it ain’t, nor yet Raymond Williams, and too many of Nash’s definitions fall nastily flat between them; but some are very much better. Credentialism, or ‘the principle that a PhD goes farther than an MSc’, joins Virtual Reality (‘real toads in imaginary gardens’) and ...”

“... Is it the fear of spreading too widely? Among living writers she does not mention Richard Altick, Raymond Williams or Anthony Smith. Nor does she speculate about newspapers and books, which co-existed easily or sometimes uneasily on W.H. Smith bookstalls, although she has a brief and useful section on periodicals which steadfastly dealt in opinions. She ...”

“... and ‘alien’ population? Invent a pessimistic dystopia. It is this dangerous facility that Raymond Williams refers to when he terms SF ‘liberated and promiscuous’. Its profundities are too painlessly arrived at. With Genetha, Roy Heath completes his Guyana trilogy following the fortunes of the Armstrong family to their dismal conclusion. The ...”

“... was of ‘the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves’, and as Raymond Williams pointed out in his 1984 meditation on 1984, this conviction accounts for a lot that happens in the novel, where the tyrannical system concerns itself mostly with controlling the intellectual minority. ...”

“... Andy Croft, Stuart Hall, Antony Easthope and Christopher Norris. The attacks are now commonplace. Raymond Williams and other writers have been making them for several years. What they amount to is this: Orwell, ostensibly a man of the Left, made his work available to the Cold War wretches on the Right. But the critics can’t make up their minds whether ...”