Mirrors of conflict
Raymond Williams was born in 1921 in Pandy, a border village in Wales. I do not know at what age he crossed the border and started making his way into English life, but he has been a major presence in English intellectual life for many years. He is now professor of drama at Cambridge University. Skilled in the discrimination of borders and hinterlands, he is particularly concerned with the interaction of ideas, values and attitudes in social life. As a teacher, he loves to show where ideas begin and end, in principle, only to emphasize that in practice their beginnings and endings are incorrigibly wayward. It is congenial to him to demonstrate that ideas have consequences. In his major books, “Culture and Society” (1958), “The Long Revolution” (1961) and “The Country and the City” (1973), Williams has been writing the social and cultural history of England, and now in “Keywords” he proposes to show how that history is disclosed in the way certain words have come to be used. “Keywords,” he says, “is not a dictionary or glossary of a particular academic subject, it is not a series of footnotes to dictionary histories or definitions of a number of words; it is, rather, the record of an inquiry into a vocabulary, a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions, in English, of the practices and institutions which we group as culture and society.”
