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“... The restoration of history to the school ‘core curriculum’, if it takes place, and if it survives the counter-pressures in the Government towards TVEI (Technical and Vocational Educational Initiative), will represent one of the more remarkable pedagogic reversals of our time. The privileged place which the new curriculum gives (in my opinion, quite rightly) to British history is in singular contrast to the implosion which has taken place in English studies, and the abandonment – now endorsed by the National Curriculum Council – of both English literature as a separate classroom subject, and set texts, the ‘cultural heritage’ which it was the special mission of school English to transmit ...”

“... This biography opens with a vivid chapter on Raymond Williams’s funeral. Entitled ‘Prologue, in Memoriam’, it transports the reader to Clodock Church, ‘a plain little building’ in the foothills of the Black Mountains. It is a comfortless day, Fred Inglis tells us. ‘The light fell crooked and the road fell wrong.’ Rooks caw speculatively on the wind, and the weather is appropriately Gothic too, a ‘bitter cold’ February day with ‘vicious showers of sleet and snow ...”

“... This is the story of simple working people – their hardships, their humours, but above all their heroism.’ The epigraph which introduced the 1939 screen version of The Stars Look Down – the words are possibly those of A.J. Cronin, the novelist, rather than of Carol Reed, the film’s director – signalled a remarkable turn-around in attitudes to the miners, as well as prefiguring what was to be the leading idiom of British wartime cinema ...”

“... are doing? What does the term mean? In the case of the splendid package inspired and edited by Raphael Samuel, it clearly means, among other things, history written by a lot of people: about fifty named authors and a ‘collective’. It also means a history arousing the active enthusiasm of a great many more. About a thousand attended the History ...”

“... In his basement kitchen​ Raphael Samuel had a cabinet of curiosities, a glass-fronted corner cupboard filled with dusty objects. Among them, a lump of coal from the Durham coalfields and a plastic National Coal Board mug; a yellow and black theatre programme for a 1956 performance of Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, with Mack the Knife sketched on the cover as a predatory city gent, with bowler and cane, about to fleece the poor; a misshapen pottery animal, half-cow, half-crocodile, made by one of the children Raphael had helped to bring up; and some relics as old as the house itself, stems and bowls from 18th-century workmen’s clay pipes with a tuft or two of the horsehair they had used to pack the plaster ...”

“... Raphael Samuel and I were undergraduates together at Balliol in the early Fifties. Bibliographically omnivorous, buried under piles of notes and unfinished essays, inkstained and dishevelled, he exuded intellectual intensity and passionate left-wing commitment. I remember his appearing at breakfast one morning, tearful and wearing a black tie ...”

“... Raphael Samuel​ adopted his notetaking method from Beatrice and Sidney Webb, progenitors of Fabian socialism, who developed it in the late 19th century:Each thought or reference to a source was written or pasted onto a single side of a loose sheet of paper. It might be the source itself – an advertisement, a jam-jar label or an extract from a Xerox – it mattered only that it was attributed and subheaded under a theme ...”

“... When Raphael Samuel died, the second volume of his projected trilogy Theatres of Memory was left unfinished. Some of the longer essays it was intended to contain were unwritten or unannotated or barely begun. The list of contents was still provisional, and the editors have assembled this book mainly by reconstructing Samuel’s shifting intentions, partly by guessing at them ...”

“... comrades established among the ivory towers and high tables of Oxbridge colleges, and with Raphael Samuel providing indefatigable leadership in inimitable style, the history workshop movement seems set fair to follow the path already blazed by that earlier enfant terrible, Past and Present, from mutinous opposition to respectable ...”

“... in 1962, but like many socialist undertakings before and since it was a creative success. Raphael Samuel, on the left, photographed in 1958 by Roger Mayne. As Eric Hobsbawm, originally a sharp opponent who later joined the ‘management committee’, put it with characteristic clarity, ‘whoever backed the Partisan must have known it was not a ...”

“... It’s four years since my husband, the historian and socialist Raphael Samuel, died of cancer at the age of 61. In the weeks after his death, I wrote about him every day. I filled a boxfile and an A3 ringbinder with anecdotes and observations, physical descriptions and characteristic phrases; I made notes on what he had told me of his childhood, on our marriage, on his work, on what we called his ‘Communist unconscious’; I even listed his shirts ...”

“... That study of the heritage industry and associated questions (‘heritage-baiting’, Raphael Samuel has called it) seems to be widely admired, but I am relieved Wright has not followed up its example. Aware that he then had a reputation for both ‘anecdotalism’ and ‘excessively abstract generalisation’, he apparently tried to redress ...”

“... than reflecting on their unique political experience. In the most readable of the retrospects, Raphael Samuel’s The Lost World of British Communism, which is full of melancholy empathy for an irrecoverable past, Communism is seen as ‘a doomed, flawed but noble faith’. But Samuel did not write his now reissued ...”

“... half of the 20th century. In The Enemy Within, an account of the 1984-85 strike he co-edited, Raphael Samuel claimed that over decades the Scottish and Welsh coalfields produced men with their ‘own distinctive version of militancy – more “educated”, more communist, more statesman-like’ than their English counterparts. One possible ...”

“... and others in 1937 – and furthered by the History Workshop movement launched in 1966 by Raphael Samuel. The modest social origins and leftish sympathies of many academic historians had generated a concern with the lives of ‘ordinary’ people rather than those of the political, social and intellectual elites. In subsequent decades, feminist ...”