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“... from his teachers at Yale, a submission to ‘the intellectual power and moral authority’ of Raymond Williams at Cambridge, and the almost inadvertent invention of the New Historicism, the école in question. The first and last of the nine essays are explanations of what he thinks New Historicism is or ought to be. The rest are investigations into ...”

“... 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. The Function of Criticism, hard on the heels of The Rape of Clarissa and Literary Theory: An Introduction, marks ...”

“... review of Benn’s 1963-67 diaries and Hilary Wainwright’s Labour: A Tale of Two Parties) and ‘Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson’. The first began, I imagine, simply as a critique of the Bennite Left and ended (famously) as a critique of Neil Kinnock. It argued that the political judgments and electoral sociology upon which the Bennites had based ...”

“... pattern John Bull of his century’ in Carlyle’s eyes; ‘a good brave old chap’ for Raymond Williams. As Williams’s remark suggests, Cobbett has been cherished but also confined by some of his most influential 20th-century interpreters. In particular, his full significance has been obscured by a ...”

“... just after the strike, entitled ‘Mining the Meaning: Key Words in the Miners’ Strike’, Raymond Williams warned that attempts to understand the dispute would be affected by the verbal and textual equivalent of the ‘noise and dust and unwanted stone’ that miners are faced with when cutting coal. Despite activists telling their stories, the ...”

“... while literary critics, represented by writers as apparently different as F.R. Leavis and Raymond Williams (although they, too, were across the hall in another town at another time), remind us of the urgencies of real life. There is much of this sort of language in the present book, which describes and commends a ‘total immersion in ...”

“... you are,’ he slurred, ‘and I’ve got one question for you. Who’s the better writer, you or Raymond Williams?’ Reading this, I found I was disappointed that the level of literary criticism among Farnham’s drunks was so low. Surely an unrelieved diet of British Sherry cannot obscure the fact that Hoggart is a far better writer than ...”

“... Bacon is made to sound too much like Descartes; the philosopher John Toland was not British; and Raymond Williams was not a Marxist. Neither was Althusser the cold-blooded adversary of experience painted here. It is true that he saw experience as the homeland of ideology; but ideology is by no means simply a pejorative term in Althusser’s ...”

“... In 1978, at a seminar on John Maynard Keynes held by the University of Kent, Raymond Williams talked about ‘The Significance of Bloomsbury as a Social and Cultural Group’. He accepted Leonard Woolf’s characterisation of Bloomsbury as consisting ‘of the upper levels of the professional middle class and county families, interpenetrated to a certain extent by the aristocracy’ with ‘an intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching far and wide’ through those classes ...”

“... for the romantic socialism of Aneurin Bevan, and for the romantic sociology of Michael Young and Raymond Williams, as the views of these three have been characterised. One of the best sayings culled for the new volume is drawn from Bevan, and is as good as the ‘poetry’ heard by someone in his speeches. ‘Lazy? Lazy?’ Bevan responded to a sneer ...”

“... and readable. However, in a later chapter on ‘Brecht’s Dramaturgy’ we’re back to what Raymond Williams would call English Brecht, whose politics need not worry us because ‘even the communists saw his plays as anti-revolutionary.’ (Some communists, no doubt, and some plays: obviously not all, since the Berliner Ensemble could never have ...”

“... of Orwell’s own essay in defence of Kipling. Hitchens lines up the most formidable detractors (Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Conor Cruise O’Brien), quotes them fairly and at length, and then demolishes them. He even follows Orwell’s injunction that a writer should be particularly severe with the work of his friends (in this case, Said). After ...”

“... them to discriminate (a key word) between the living and the hollow. The Uses of Literacy, like Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, which appeared a year later, was a product of the tension between its author’s Leavisian methods and his un-Leavisian politics. The highly personal survey of working-class culture in the first half of The Uses of ...”

“... I could not have imagined, that the je-ne-sais-quoi was a modern “keyword” of the kind that Raymond Williams … seemed to me to have left underinvestigated.’ The keyword, that is, ‘of conspicuously foreign derivation’. Williams himself, as Scholar notes, referred to the importance and difficulty of ...”

“... 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 ...”