It is customary to begin even the shortest account of advertising by recalling the three thousand year old papyrus from Thebes, offering a reward for a runaway slave Advertising: the Magic System, in @newleftreview.bsky.social, 1960 (later published in Culture & Materialism, 1980)

'With their power at our backs we shall recover Gwent. While the Normans dispute their throne, Wales will at last be free again. I, Iorwerth son of Owain son of Caradoc, have thrown the stone and made this certain.' - People of the Black Mountains II: The Eggs of the Eagle, 1990

After so many years, [Mark] found it hard to focus on Norman, though it was not a problem of unfamiliarity. On the contrary, in dress and manner Norman was like so many of his Cambridge colleagues - Loyalties, 1985

"Men annoyed you," I suggested. "You got tired of being a cross between a coat hanger and a sex object" - The Volunteers, 1978

Working with the @weaadulted.bsky.social is not just a matter of committees, important as they are [but] also a matter of constant experiment in teaching; and the WEA is one of the very few institutions in which this is possible - An Open Letter to WEA Tutors, 1961

Working with the @weaadulted.bsky.social is not just a matter of committees, important as they are [but] also a matter of constant experiment in teaching; and the WEA is one of the very few institutions in which this is possible - An Open Letter to WEA Tutors, 1961

The dramatic conventions of any given period are fundamentally related to the structure of feeling in that period - Preface to Film (with Michael Orrom), 1954

As Orwell put it: England was a decent family with the wrong members in charge - You're a Marxist Aren't You?, 1975

oor people and vagrants, the casualties of a changing rural economy, or the hard-pressed or ambitious seeing in London some escape from their sub-ordinate destiny, were the explicit objects of exclusion from the developing city - The Country and the City, 1973

#Christmas again; before we've time to stop And think, it's caught us on the hop; The old year is but folly, looking ahead Imagination sees the star turn red - Buy Us to Read on the Train, Cambridge University Journal, 1940

The old cheapjack is still there in the market, with the country boys' half-crowns on his reputed packets of gold rings or watches. He thinks of his victims as a slow, ignorant crowd, but they live, and farm, while he coughs behind his portable stall - Culture is Ordinary, 1958

Some of [English literature's] fundamental meanings and values have belonged to the cultural achievements of long-past societies - Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory, @newleftreview.bsky.social, 1973

We must, then, retain the right to judge a civilization by its culture. For #culture is the embodiment of the quality of living of a society; it is this `standard of living' with which the critic is concerned - Soviet Literary Controversy in Retrospect, 1947

Looking back on life in a working-class family and neighbourhood, what most of us see is a compulsive conformity, which we both value and fear - Working Class Culture, in 'Universities & Left Review, 1957 Vol.1 No 2

'Putting Mandela in gaol is no kind of a joke' Lewis said, aggressively 'But you are not Mandela and this is not a gaol' Forrester said sharply. 'This is a college chapel, which you have defaced like any hooligan' - The Writing On the Wall, 1990

I came down this morning from a village above Abergavenny: travelling the quite short distance to this centre of the mining valleys, and travelling also, in memories, the connections and the distance between one kind of country and another - The Social Significance of 1926, 1976

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

Irish history had broken into revolution, a war of liberation and civil war by the time [Sean] O'Casey began to write for the Abbey Theatre. His first acted play, The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), is a response to this experience of violence - Drama From Ibsen to Brecht, 1973

Black power in the United States, civil rights in Ulster, the language in Wales, are experiences comparable in this respect to the student movement and to women’s liberation - review of Ned Thomas's The Welsh Extremist, 1971

Perhaps it is that [Parry] pays insufficient attention to his game, and has developed other interests that are less sporting, interests which places like Cardiff know well enough to provide - Parry, R., c.1939

It isn't my business to pry into private affairs. But let me put it this way. I'm saying, on what I know, that Mark Evans changed, when he was elected and went to London - The Volunteers, 1978

Our comrades in Eastern Europe are not, like us, confronting an entrenched and still powerful capitalist order. It means that they can look, already, along a different road. Yet in practice, like us, only look - Beyond Actually Existing Socialism, @newleftreview.bsky.social, 1980

People, including Richard Hoggart, refer to "working-class speech". There is of course no such thing: the only class speech in Britain is that of the middle and upper classes; the remaining variations are regional - Working Class Culture, Universities & Left Review, 1957

I come from Pandy - Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, 1979

Instead of the static Utopias of pre-C19th writing when men would find an ideal condition, an island or some point in the future where their social problems would have been solved, Utopias now, as [HG} Wells observed must be dynamic [and] not stand still - Social Darwinism, 1973

Stuart Hall on Williams: His books have no comparison among contemporary writing for range and stubbornness of critical intelligence - New Statesman, 2008

It was a steady pattern: Mrs Praager in London, Mrs Evans in Wales. Parliamentary and Ministerial duties; the long sessions; the shortening constituency visits and vacations - The Volunteers, 1978

The term [British] was not used much, except by people one distrusted. ‘British’ was hardly ever used without ‘Empire’ following and for that nobody had any use at all - 'Boyhood', Politics and Letters, 1979

Of Georg Lukacs' 'History & Class-Consciousness': In the scale of its contemporary influence it is joined only by the Prison Notebooks from the late 20s of Antonio Gramsci, and by the work of Sartre in the 50s and 60s - Lucien Goldmann and Marxism’s Alternative Tradition, 1972

[There] are political forms that now limit, subordinate and destroy people. We have to begin again with people and build new political forms - Towards 2000, 1983

If you try to say what you feel and know, you have to fight off the mechanical hands trying to stick their own labels on you or get your voice on one of their recordings - The Future of #Marxism, 1961 (republished in @newleftreview.bsky.social no.114, 2018)

I didn't realise until many years later that many of the ideas that I had absorbed in [Pandy on the Welsh-English border], and had later expressed, were in a sense common property throughout a very wide area of Welsh social thought - The Importance of Community, 1977

For a long time Labour in Parliament has had no intention of changing the social order, though it has made some important reforms inside it. And in the same period the trade union movement has not really been pressing them - The Forward March of Labour Halted?, 1981

A skilled theatrical craftsman might well remain satisfied with such a situation, and go on writing plays for stock. But [Henrik] #Ibsen was always an artist, for whom the communication of significant experience must be the primary concern - Drama From Ibsen to Brecht, 1973

Some men will be satisfied [that] they are the individuals and others the masses, the excluded group. Yet by this extending process we are all converted to masses, for nowhere in a world so composed, can our individuality be fully recognised by others - The Long Revolution, 1961

Old Wyndham still ran the garage, and the local bus, in Trawsfynydd, up the valley, north-west of Gwenton. The Owens brothers and their families, every year, rented his two caravans for their holidays - Second Generation, 1964

If we are looking for one position from which this work of struggle and renewal has already begun, it is this: that since there are many peoples and cultures, there will be many socialisms - Towards Many Socialisms, 1985

But working class #materialism - the collective improvement of the common life - is objectively, in our circumstances, a humane ideal - Working Class Culture, in Universities & Left Review, 1957, Vol.1 No 2

Are we to understand 'culture' as 'the arts', as 'a system of meanings and values', or as a 'whole way of life', and how are these to be related to 'society' and 'the economy'? - Marxism and Literature, 1977

@llannerch.bsky.social: "To be truly radical is to make hope possible instead of despair convincing" < Love this! #LeadersF25

Places like London are having their attempts to satisfy real popular needs stopped by the central machine. This of course reproduces the case that has been made in Wales and Scotland for a long time - 'Decentralism and the Politics of Place', in Society and Space, 1985

In the deep cross-valley, under the Cotswold scarp, the trees of early November still held their dying leaves - Loyalties, 1985

#Chartism is an ideal beyond the terms of any dominant group in the society, and is more than an expression of democratic aspirations; [it] is also an assertion of an individual dignity transcending #class - The Long Revolution, 1961

News readers on both major [UK] channels are now media personalities: their identity is strongly projected, and they are presented as adding their personality to the news - notes to the 2nd ed., Television: Technology and Cultural Form, 1990

The strategy [for the Left] is all still to be found, but what blocks it is this old model of creating a relatively powerful, united Britain with a 'successful' sovereign econony. That, I think, is what history has ruled out - The Practice of Possibility, in @newstatesman1913.bsky.social, 1987

"There are Welsh among our neighbours, my Lord. They give us no trouble" "Welsh and give no trouble?" the lord laughed. He turned to enjoy his joke with the troop - People of the Black Mountains 2: The Eggs of the Eagle, 1990

Ysbryd Harri Webb ar gerdded heno mi dybiaf: The sprit of Harri Webb: (Medievalism always read symbolically. Driving the fascists - Farage, Tice - back over the border tonight I hope)

People have to, in the end, direct their own lives, control their own places, live by their own feelings - 'Culture and Politics: @plaidcymru.bsky.social's Challenge to Wales', 1975 (originally a BBC Radio 3 lecture)