Raymond Williams

‘I see the news is bad again.’ The banal phrase punctuates my memories of the late 1930s. I remember an adolescent anger that people would not name the things that were happening: the invasion of Austria; the cession of the Sudetenland; the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Albania – all packaged as ‘the news’. While in London it no doubt seenmed ridiculous that Chamberlain referred to Czechoslovakia as a far-off country of which we knew little or nothing. I could see, there in Wales, that what he said was true for these railwaymen and farmers, whose gravity and abstraction, at this level of affairs, at once puzzled and irritated me.

What is the difference between a satirist and an impressionist? I don’t know – what is the difference between a satirist and an impressionist?

Bert Brecht, the Communist poet and playwright, has become a cultural monument. Is it then not time, he might ask, to consider blowing him up?

The most arresting image on television, in recent weeks, has been the stylish map of the world which introduces Newsnight. It does not show the Falkland/Malvinas islands.

Some very important changes in socialist ideas are now beginning to come through in Europe. Yet at the surface of politics they are invisible in Britain, even though there are those here who have contributed to them. Where they have become visible at the surface, as most notably in the rise of the Green Party in the German Federal Republic, they are still commonly interpreted as a local ‘ecological’ variation, without long-term effect on the main body of socialist institutions and ideas. Similarly, the difficult argument about relations between the Left and the popular campaigns for nuclear disarmament – description of these as the Peace Movement raises the precise point – is often displaced to the idea of a ‘single issue’, which leaves the main body of politics intact.