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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 18h

'I know you men think you're being loyal' Major Blakely said evenly. 'I admire you in a way, but you're quite fatally wrong. The coal owners can't afford more. The whole industry is depressed. And the Government can't let our national life break down - Border Country, 1960

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

At dusk, above Darren, the glow of the steel furnace spread each evening into the sky, and many turned now to watch it more seriously, and to think of the black valleys that lay hidden beyond - Border Country, 1960

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Where I was born was under the Black Mountains, on the Welsh border, where the meadows are bright green against the red earth of the ploughland, and the first trees, beyond the window, are oak and holly - The Country and the City, 1973

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing - Resources of Hope, 1989

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Most novels are in some sense knowable communities - The Country and The City, 1973

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

A working country is hardly ever a landscape. The very idea of landscape implies separation and observation - The Country And The City, 1973

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

If we look back over recent centuries, the successes are truly spectacular, and we ought to keep reminding ourselves of them - The Long Revolution, 1961

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

They climbed to the new rebrick houses, leaving behind the grey of the town. There was a multiple sign: Rowan Avenue, Walnut Grove, Spindle Lane, Oak Close, Chestnut Cloe. 'The new nature,' Alun had joked - Loyalties, 1985

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

What I did not perceive at the time but I now understand is that the grammar schools were implanted in the towns of Wales for the purpose of Anglicization. They imposed a completely English orientation, which cut one off thoroughly from Welshness - Politics and Letters, 1979

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

[‘working-class culture’] is not proletarian art, or council houses, or a particular use of language; it is rather the basic collective idea, and the institutions, manners, habits of thought, and intention which proceed from this - Culture and Society, 1958

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

A note had been passed to them, from Phyllis Rees: 'Sweetheart now, who you may be, Sign and pass it back to me.' This was usual, but they had to think of a good answer. They looked at each other, widening their eyes - Border Country, 1960

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

For thirty miles he had been able to look back at the mountains, at the blue peaks and the long grey ridge, gradually lowering in the sky. Now, when the last contact had gone, he looked at a different country, flat and open - Border Country, 1960

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Of course social systems change: in their general character and in their internal relations. By the time of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the middle of the C19th, an industrial and commercial bourgeoisie was becoming dominant - The Bloomsbury Fraction, 1980

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

The novel is flooded with unmistakably Welsh language and feeling, and the general landscape of those first turbulent iron towns is retained, yet there is an evidently deliberate exclusion of local Welsh references and names - foreword to All Things Betray Thee, 1986

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

The English country, year by year, had been made and remade by men, and the English town was at once its image and its agent (honest or dishonest, as advantage served) - The Country and the City, 1973

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

But a father is more than a person, he’s in fact a society, the thing you grow up into - Border Country, 1960

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Nobody fortunate enough to grow up in a good home in a genuinely well-mannered and sensitive community, could for a moment envy these loud, competitive, deprived people [at Cambridge University] - What I Came to Say, 1989

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Emma relaxed, looking quietly down at the steep Welsh valley. The August bracken was thick and green on its slopes. The yellow gorse was still in flower, and there were scattered thorns and rowan, each isolated tree casting its shadow - Loyalties, 1985

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Then at the end of her contract time, with John Scott-Withers scaling new heights of admiration - the new new New Woman - [Rosa] had been abruptly fired - The Volunteers, 1978

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Raymond Williams - born #OTD in 1921 was born in Pandy, a small farming village in the foothills of the Black Mountains in south east Wales

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

The only landscape I ever see, in dreams, is the Black Mountain village in which I was born - The Country And The City, 1973

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

The typical Welsh intellectual is – as we say – only one generation away from shirt sleeves - Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, 1979

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Mrs Hybart put down the iron, and went across to the fire. 'Well, they always say, boy. Like father like son' 'I don't know what you mean' 'The father goes on strike, the boy throws away the book' - Border Country, 1960

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

The idea of the rebel still carries a strong positive valuation, though in fact rebels are few - The Long Revolution, 1961

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Matthew] Arnold's emphasis on #culture - his kind of emphasis - was a direct response to the social crisis of those years [1860s], and what he saw as opposed to culture was anarchy - A Hundred Years of Culture and Anarchy, in The Spokesman, #8, 1970

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

The troubled tears of strike and lock-out, which had affected the village only slightly, moved now to their crisis, and touched this valley under its lonely mountains - Border Country, 1960

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

'It is a law among us Welsh that a soldier is given shelter.' 'Even an English soldier?' 'If he comes in peace' Oldcastle smiled and went on with his work. Caradoc went back to the cider press - People of the Black Mountains II: The Eggs of the Eagle, 1990

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Countryside, originally a Scottish term to indicate a specific locality, became in C19th a general term to describe not only the rural areas but the whole rural life and economy - Keywords, revised ed., 1983

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

If you start from the idea of livelihood, you are starting from a human place and from the interests of all the human beings involved. It is a way of life and not a way of producing - Ecology and the Labour Movement lecture, 1984

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

There is indeed an extraordinary muddle, now very damaging politically, in those accounts of the ‘old working class’ which celebrate, by contrast with their post-war successors, the lack of what is called materialism’ - Desire, review of Landscape For A Good Woman by Carolyn Steedman, in LRB, 1986

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

As anyone knows who's knocked around in politics: 'no politics' is also politics. And that having no politics, affiliated to no politics, having no political position is a form of politics - Ecology and #Socialism, lecture to the Socialist Environment & Resources Association, 1980

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

This is precisely Social Democracy, in its post-1917 sense. But it is now called Socialist or Marxist. The whole spectrum of the political vocabulary has thus been moved to the right - Notes On British Marxism Since 1945, in @newleftreview.bsky.social , 1976

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I was born in 1921 and grew up in an atmosphere of Christian instruction, left wing politics and opposition to war - letter to a tribunal following Williams' refusal to be 're-mobbed', 1951

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

The troubled tears of strike and lock-out, which had affected the village only slightly, moved now to their crisis, and touched this valley under its lonely mountains - Border Country, 1960

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

When I was a boy in my father's house I could look every day at your mountains. That strange black wall attracted me, and I had dreams of making discoveries behind it - People of the Black Mountains II: The Eggs of the Eagle, 1990

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

No coherent analysis of capitalist power, no movement of socialist education and propaganda, no authentic ideology of social change, has emerged from the institutional Labour Party for two decades - May Day Manifesto 1968, 1968

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

The supply of advertising money (the contemporary equivalent of manna) can only come in the end from us, as workers and buyers, though it is now routed through channels that give control of this social capital to very limited groups - Freedom and ownership in the art, in NLR, 1960

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Unbalanced development of cities and industrial towns, through the periods of centralization of state power, concentration of the money market, and large-scale factory production, drained the rural economy of much of its work and relative autonomy - Between Country and City, 1984

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

I was teaching political economy in California, which sounds like a joke in itself - Ecology and the Labour Movement, lecture to the Socialist Environment and Resources Association, 2 June 1984

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

We are bound to encounter the usual human reluctance to change and we must accept that changes will be very considerable and will have to be negotiated rather than imposed - Socialism and Ecology, 1982

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Derek Tatton's 1988 PhD: "The tension between political commitment and academic neutrality in the W.E.A." oro.open.ac.uk/57029/1/3821...

oro.open.ac.uk

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

All that will ever break #capitalism, is capitalists. The faster they run the more strain on their heart - Loyalties, 1985

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Democratic planning is an easy phrase, but nobody really knows how it would work, and the spectacular success of economic planning elsewhere have after all not coexisted with any general democracy -The Long Revolution, 1961

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

t was indeed in one sense a grave loss, that 'society' lost its sense of immediate direct relation to others and became the general abstract term for a whole social-political system - The Importance of Community, in Radical Wales #18, 1988

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

"Professionalism," said Mr Stanton, as the final whistle blew, "professionalism is the curse of sport. It is a corruption of our youth. I shall warn Parry against your offer" - Parry, R written circa 1939 but unpublished until 2008 by @parthianbooks.bsky.social

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

In Britain league football and the more organised popular forms of horse-racing began in the third quarter of the C19th, and their development & expansion are indices of the development of a new urban leisure - Television: Technology and Cultural Form, second ed., 1990,

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Through the intricacies of the politics, and they are very intricate indeed, I want the Welsh people - still a very radical and cultured people - to defeat, override or bypass bourgeois England - Politics and Letters, 1979

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

No mode of production and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention - #Marxism and Literature, 1977

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Reposted by Raymond Williams

Melitoast @melitoast.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

Awesome. Let's ditch the power of nightmares (Adam Curits) once and for all. Hope and light by example. Long overdue.

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Raymond Williams @raymondkeywords.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

this is a great paper from the year before Culture and Society was published and not widely known about. DM if you would like a pdf of it

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