When the socialist intellectual and writer Raymond Williams died, suddenly and prematurely, in January 1988 at the age of 66, tributes expressed the loss in superlative terms. The British left, Robin Blackburn wrote in New Left Review, had lost its “most authoritative, consistent and radical voice” and the national culture its “most acute critic”. At a commemorative evening the following year, the theorist Stuart Hall told the audience that Williams “is in my view without question the most important cultural critic, historian and theorist of the postwar period”.
The loss was also felt in unusually personal terms. At the 1989 memorial chaired by Hall, the psychoanalyst and socialist feminist Juliet Mitchell confessed she was still reeling from Williams’s death: “For me Raymond came to have an almost mythical importance. His work for me is a presence.” Colin MacCabe, who got to know Williams well in the 1970s, and Hilary Wainwright, who encountered Williams through their joint involvement in the Socialist Society in the 1980s, both described the strength of Williams’s “presence”. For Terry Eagleton, Williams’s friend and former student and colleague in the English department at Cambridge, where Williams taught from 1961 until he retired in 1983, he was “very much a father figure – not just to me. He was very fatherly, in some sense.”
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