Raymond Williams Paperback / softback

Raymond Williams—a Welsh media critic and one of the founding thinkers behind the popular field of cultural studies—believed that the traditional focus of biographies on individuals isolated these people from their communities.

For this reason, Alan O'Connor looks at Williams and his time period, one of social change and crisis in Wales and England.

Williams, the son of a railway worker, would have pursued university studies, an atypical act for a working-class boy, had the Second World War not disrupted his plans.

So the unorthodox intellectual executed his work outside the university until 1960, decades after he originally intended to begin his studies. O'Connor then turns to Williams's studies of media, revealing his subject's life-long emphasis on the interchange between culture and democracy.

He shows the ways in which these ideas were revolutionary, upsetting conservative thinkers of the time, and concludes with the same message of hope that Williams carried with him daily: In a period dominated by conservative forces, Raymond Williams still thought it worthwhile to struggle for small changes.