Border Crossing: Raymond Williams

When Raymond Williams died suddenly in 1988, at the age of sixty-six, the tributes were generous and admiring to the point of being fulsome, and he was hailed as, among other things, the greatest socialist thinker of his time in Britain. Yet as obituary piety starts to give way to more measured assessment, even sympathetic critics cannot help compiling long lists of defects, and the basis of his very considerable standing becomes more and more puzzling or at least in need of some fuller explanation. He wrote too much; he often wrote badly; much of what he wrote has been subjected to damning and justified criticism; his political judgment could be poor; and so on and so on. And yet the tributes accumulate: for many he remains a model of w...