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“... is neither the only tradition nor the first language to have grown up within these islands. One of Raymond William’s polemical purposes in People of the Black Mountains, his final fiction, is to affirm that Wales has its own distinct identity, founded in unremembered time which reaches beyond written records. People of the Black Mountains is in part an ...”

“... Security is the problem that exercises both Philip Roth and Raymond Williams. The sort of ‘security’ I mean is the sort that spreads a feeling of insecurity – a fear of surveillance, bugging, secret cameras, interrogation, the false smile of Mr Nice and the sincere snarl of Mr Nasty. Security men are sometimes clumsy and might cause us inconvenience through their category mistakes ...”

“... It is a surprise to find Raymond Williams, in the year of his retirement as Professor of Drama at Cambridge, editing a series called ‘Literature in History’. In a writing career that almost spans the post-war period, he has established himself as this country’s leading critic within academic English of the very concept of ‘Literature ...”

“... Orwell, Adrian Stokes, Tony Crosland – as he calls him – Richard Titmuss, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, John Berger, E.P. Thompson and Isaiah Berlin. If you need a stereotype of the English socialist, you may as well take this one as any other, though it’s hard to do any worthwhile thinking so long as you burden yourself with such a ...”

“... series of obituary notices. One by one the giants have departed: Leavis, Richards, Empson, and now Raymond Williams. The first three had come through to ripe and embattled old age, but Williams was still in his prime as a writer and critic. When I visited him in Saffron Walden in late December, he had been laid up for ...”

“... Eagleton’s Sixties Cambridge had the moral fervour of Leavis and the political consciousness of Raymond Williams. There is some plausibility in the view that Eagleton is still a Cambridge man: in his essay ‘The Terry Eagleton Story’, Bernard Bergonzi pointed to the end of Literary Theory: An Introduction, with its expressed preference for ...”

“... intrinsically oppressive) and the latter positively (as intrinsically ‘liberating’). Raymond Williams has made a more persistent attempt to grasp the nature of this relation than any living British writer and has certainly avoided sentimentalising imagination, even if his conception of power has proved rather more equivocal. In the present ...”

“... There is a poignant moment in the recent New Left Books volume of interviews with Raymond Williams* when he is congratulated on the ‘combativity’ of his writings. Poignant because the neologism, however barbarous, answers to a real scarcity: the scarcity, in our cultural repertoire, of sustained polemical address: Not that our literary pages don’t witness occasional outbreaks of revenger’s tragedy ...”

“... When Raymond Williams died suddenly, aged 66, in January 1988, estimations of him were sharply divided. There were those who regarded him as a deservedly influential literary and cultural critic, a major socialist theorist and an exemplary instance of the union of intellectual seriousness and political purpose ...”

“... judicious though these reservations are when compared with the enthusiasm of George Steiner or Raymond Williams. The Red Brigades, however, have not been forgotten. And people still wear blue jeans. Professor Eco wore blue jeans ten years ago. They felt tight around his testicles. He became more aware of his body. He understood what women felt like ...”

“... One night in Miami,’ Raymond Williams wrote in 1973, ‘still dazed from a week on an Atlantic liner, I began watching a film and at first had some difficulty adjusting to a much greater frequency of commercial “breaks”.’ Things didn’t get any easier for him. Trailers for two other movies began to appear as inserts; the one he’d started with, about a crime in San Francisco, was interrupted not only by advertisements for cereal and deodorant, but by a romance set in Paris and then the roar of a prehistoric monster laying waste to New York ...”

“... that makes our current grayness and prudential sleekness the more shaming. Two meditations by Raymond Williams (in sadness, one imagines them to have been his epilogue) frame the contents. The prefatory statement is hesitant and somewhat opaque. Too briefly, it seeks to discriminate between Modernism and avant-garde, between authentic socialist ...”

“... not, strictly speaking, either claimed to be English or cared to be thought so. Frank Kermode, Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton are proud of their Manx, Welsh and Irish roots. As a result, each one’s journey from the periphery to the centre, from the working-class outskirts of English culture to its middle and upper-class core, from outlandish ...”

“... various densely-packed interviews with him in this collection testify well enough. Far more than Raymond Williams or Perry Anderson, and more persistently than E.P. Thompson, Hall has been the Left’s finest instance of the strategic intellectual, the theorist as mediator and interventionist, broker and communicator, bringing the more arcane flights of ...”

“... her most original project is to inspect the contribution of a range of forceful male theorists – Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Mikhail Bakhtin – in a similarly sceptical light. Given her suspicion of the theoretical, her concentration on these figures looks incongruous. In fact, she demonstrates no wish for a wholesale renunciation of theoretical ...”