Abstract

• ARTICLES " CULTURE, COMMUNITY, NATION hough I was never taught by Raymond Williams, and worked T with him only in an informal capacity from time to time, he had a major influence on my intellectual and political formation. 1 We met in Oxford in the mid 1950s - he as a lecturer in adult education while I was an undergraduate and, later, a graduate student. At a key moment in the formation of the first New Left, some of us read Culture and Society in draft; and it helped to give a decisive shape to the concern with 'cultural politics' which has characterized the thinking and practice of an independent critical 'New Left' ever since. Thereafter, our paths crossed continually - on the Board of New Left Review, which I edited for a time; in the drafting of the May Day Manifesto; everywhere in the development of Cultural Studies, with which I was directly connected through the Birming- ham Centre from 1964 onwards; and in anguished conversation in the eighties, as we all tried in different ways to make sense of the disorientation of the left under the impact of Thatcherism and the forces it unleashed, until his