“... write?’ We are now finding out. ‘Dominant’/‘Emergent’: ordinarily these are treated as Raymond Williams has defined them – as antithetical terms to distinguish social, cultural and technological forces that are ‘on top’ from those that are ‘on the bottom’ but moving up. But in an age of ‘Future Fall’ and ‘Future Shock’, the ...”

“... without, of course, marshalling them into a Great Tradition. Five of them – the exception being Raymond Roussel – he reads habitually ‘in order to get started; a poetic jump-start for times when the batteries have run down’. The surprise is that instead of lecturing on Wallace Stevens, William Carlos ...”

“... in the social foundations of language use and linguistic change. It was a railway worker’s son, Raymond Williams, who ran with the idea that words had social histories embedded in them. His Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976) was a book which Empson reviewed with an admiration qualified by the lordly but feline observation, like a lion ...”

“... was not an echo, let alone a voice.’ Fuller concedes that some attention was given to Ruskin by Raymond Williams, but ‘I don’t think there were many who took his exhortation to study Ruskin seriously,’ although there was ‘even then, plenty of academic scholarship focused on the unresolved details of Ruskin’s sexual and marital history’. A ...”

“... household. The new generation of ‘cultural materialists’, however (the term is borrowed from Raymond Williams, who contributes an afterword), are much more suspicious of ‘high culture’. In his introduction to Political Shakespeare, Jonathan Dollimore analyses a tripartite pattern in ideological conflicts of consolidation, subversion and ...”

“... who have supposedly tried to disguise or minimise this fact, first and foremost E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams. (He takes special delight in exposing Thompsonian heroes such as William Cobbett and William Blake as racists and misogynists, less convincingly in the second case.) How can contempt be overcome? How can low and abused subjects become equal ...”

“... by Partisan Review. Against the background of the war in Vietnam, and drawing on the writing of Raymond Williams, Sartre, Neruda, it argued for a new kind of civic literature. Initially it was left alone; but then the police started to notice that when they picked up student radicals, copies of the journal were regularly to be found in their ...”

“... and insular’ middle-class undergraduates. Some new arrivals, like Hobsbawm or the working-class Raymond Williams, were ‘alienated and shocked’ by this. Briggs sailed through almost impervious to it all, soon a star in two different college debating societies and drafting a ‘History of Modern Times’ (his first unfinished project). War brought ...”

“... to read her piece) was that of William Godwin’s Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, published in 1794. Hazlitt would have agreed. ‘We conceive no one ever began Caleb Williams that did not read it through,’ he declared in 1825. Here, as a test, are the opening lines, delivered by Caleb, the ...”

“... poet with atrophied tastes, he can expect a commission to do something tasteful on Glynn Williams. The Commander has become the ashy residue of Neo-Romanticism, out there in the Fens, a John Piper with backbone, silhouetted against lowering skies, fretting to escape the inconvenience of some vulgar stiff and get at those rough flint churches. Philip ...”

“... stands English comedy,’ David Frost is reported to have declaimed, as Frankie Howerd and Kenneth Williams stood side by side on his doorstep. Williams was unimpressed. ‘I thought to myself, “Then many people would be lacking in perception,” but shouted drunken goodbyes and reeled down the street into a taxi.’ What ...”

“... in a piece of rhetorical brilliance about the profligacy of Thatcherism. In 1990 he sneered at Raymond Williams as a kindly old fellow from the valleys. In 1999, he savaged an authorised biography of Mandela, creating a stir on the letters page by identifying him – correctly – as a former communist. He rarely lets a response to a piece he has ...”

“... Glissant, Langston Hughes and Eugene O’Neill. Taken together they secure the point once made by Raymond Williams: ‘A time of revolution is so evidently a time of violence, dislocation and extended suffering that it is natural to feel it as tragedy … there will of course be revenge … after the bitterness and deformity of oppression.’ In this ...”

“... Keywords’, Jan Zita Grover runs through a lexicon of Aids vocabulary after the manner of Raymond Williams, angrily expounding the ways in which PLWA (people living with Aids) are linguistically punished by the rest of the community. Her approach is determinedly polemical, so that despite what must be an overwhelming sympathy with many aspects of ...”

“... class and community-based solidarities were replaced by the more atomised, consumerist lifestyles Raymond Williams called ‘mobile privatisation’. That this benefited the SNP rather than the Conservatives has been accounted for in various ways: the improving organisational capacity of the SNP during the 1960s; the discovery of North Sea oil; or David ...”