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“... of Alfred Kroeber’s explanation for the abolition of taboos: cultural fatigue. According to Raymond Williams’s classic account, the notion of ‘culture’ (which was invented only at the end of the 18th century) achieved its influence and intellectual authority by setting itself up as a standard against which capitalist or industrial modernity ...”

“... as a Bible on matters linguistic. Nor, one imagines, could a post-Willinsky scholar do what Raymond Williams did in the Fifties and base a major intellectual enterprise on the confident assumption that OED represents ‘a systematic, reliable and comprehensive history of the English vocabulary’ – raw lexical material. In the Foreword of ...”

“... Primary School. But a mural, or some other permanent memorial, to Beryl Gilroy is planned. As Raymond Williams pointed out (and Paul Gilroy has echoed), we create shared values by choosing our forebears according to our present needs.Listen to Paul Gilroy talk to Adam Shatz on the LRB ...”

“... and memorably responding to, wave after wave of neo-Marxist theory. As major influences, Sartre, Williams, Lukacs, Goldmann, Anderson, Althusser, Macherey, Benjamin, Derrida and the feminist movement have followed one another in quick succession.’ Literary theory, in this view, has become a self-contained preserve for intellectuals who talk to each other ...”

“... It is an instructive allegory of the relations between culture and politics. In Modern Tragedy, Raymond Williams deals with what one might call the politics of death, insisting on how culturally variable it can be so as to counter what he sees as a reactionary metaphysics: ‘To say that man dies alone is not to state a fact but to offer an ...”

“... novels needed now – by more than a few readers with a special interest in him or his times? Raymond Williams advised Patrick Parrinder against reading the novels in the winter, as ‘a tactful and tolerant supervisor solicitous about my emotional health’, as Parrinder puts it. Scandal and an absolutely efflorescent unhappiness are to be found ...”

“... of socialism’s current intellectual problem is to find an alternative myth (for Rudolf Bahro and Raymond Williams ecology was the green hope, as the red faded). In Das Kapital, published a few years earlier, Karl Marx tore apart the workings of the 19th-century world. But, notoriously, he never said much about the earthly paradise he hoped for. Looking ...”

“... are all impeccably of the Left, but by no means all are intellectuals. There is not only Professor Raymond Williams but Bernard Dix of NUPE and Jack Adams, Convenor at BL, Longbridge; not only Martin Jacques, editor of Marxism Today, but Peter Carter, UCATT regional organiser; not only Royden Harrison, professor of social history at Warwick, but Jack ...”

“... writers began to raise new questions about the cultural roots of the modern machine age. When Raymond Williams published Culture and Society in 1958, he began by pointing out that the later 18th century witnessed decisive shifts in the sense of terms such as ‘industry’, once signifying conscientious diligence, now referring rather to the ...”

“... in their pursuit of implication. There were attempts to keep the two ways of thinking together. Raymond Williams wrote of ‘structures of feeling’ but didn’t forget expressions of feeling. Foucault’s metaphor of archaeology was loyal to Lévi-Strauss’s buried history but allowed constant connections to the visible history of the material ...”

“... tread a narrow line between cynicism and credulity. There are thinkers like Jürgen Habermas, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson who can be too positive about ordinary human capabilities, and others like Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou and the later Frankfurt School who are a good deal too sceptical of them. This is​ a bold book, not least because ...”

“... wonderful-horrible appellation meant as a homage to a traumatic seminar with Raymond Williams at Oxford in the early 1980s), he knows that the old map of oppositions – high and low culture, Modernist and mass art, uptown and downtown – no longer corresponds to the world. So he makes a chart of his own, and devises a lexicon to go ...”

“... from a charming woman who wrote wry nostalgic sketches to a major figure in Victorian studies. Raymond Williams jump-started this re-evaluation in 1958, when he described her first novel, Mary Barton, as ‘the most moving response in literature to the industrial suffering of the 1840s’. Although Williams went on ...”

“... hear his voice when turning to certain poems. For all his influence, he did not have charisma, as Raymond O’Malley notes. ‘He listened. In particular, he always searched for the sense behind a student’s seeming nonsense.’ O’Malley quotes one of Leavis’s favourite phrases from Hopkins to characterise the master: ‘the intolerable wrestle / With ...”

“... the British Left and its intelligentsia 1968-86 and not allude to, among others, E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn, R.D. Laing, and the personnel of the New Statesman, would be to create another kind of absent centre. Caute solves this problem by resort to the teasing deceits of the Disraelian political ...”