Keywords

An academic, and the writer of both non-fiction and fiction, Raymond Williams (1921–88) was one of the most important and influential British thinkers of the twentieth century. Williams wrote about politics, culture, mass media and literature, and his work was key to the development of cultural studies. His best-known books include ‘Culture and Society’, ‘The Long Revolution’ and ‘The Country and the City’.

‘A revelatory unpacking of the complicated disputes that lay – dormant, as it were – within familiar words’ Guardian‘Williams’s essential point about the social and political stakes in simple words and phrases is as true today as it was in the 1970s: think of the many battles that have erupted around terms like “liberal,” “torture,” “pro-life” or “intelligent design”’ New York Times‘This book is an erudite, elegant, and awful warning to anybody tempted to lay down the lexicographical law, in order to apply one authoritative fixed sense to a highly variable and controversial value word’ The Times‘Keywords is useful and stimulating to all who work with words or merely love them’ Wall Street Journal‘The book’s greatest value, perhaps, is its exemplification of how all of us should respond to the words we hear and use: with surprise, distrust, curiosity, and unflagging vigilance’ Yale Review‘An invaluable book … A unique coda to the words of one of our most original and provocative thinkers’ Harpers