I am of my tribe

The Guardian Book of the Week Saturday 24 May 2008.

To read David Hare's full review click here

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London Review of Books

Ready Steady Book

Using a rich array of material from Raymond Williams's hitherto unused personal papers - juvenilia, diaries, letters, unpublished novels and stories, notebooks, work drafts and fragments - Dai Smith takes us through the formative years on the Welsh Border as the son of a railway signalman and his wife, on to Cambridge in 1939 and War service in Normandy, to show in telling detail how the making of Culture and Society (1958) and the writing of his novel Border Country (1960) was all of a piece in the conceptual breakthrough he strove to make in the 1950s.The meaning of Raymond Williams is revealed in his making. This biography places its central figure within a deeply researched social and cultural history so that we can see again, as Raymond Williams insisted we should that culture is "a whole way of life".

It is a remarkable piece of work and will henceforth be essential to the understanding of the making of Raymond Williams

Eric Hobsbawm

A Superb Biography

Terry Eagleton The Guardian

ISBN 978 1905762 996

£12.99