His complex character, indeed his whole life, was held together by two qualities - scholarship and political conviction - which made him a major influence on three decades of political thought

He was the foremost political thinker of his generation in Britain who in his most formidable books, Culture And Society, The Long Revolution and The Country and the City, redrew the map of our cultural history, and elsewhere made heroic interventions in the main political debates of his time

For those who read English in the '60s, it was common to revere Williams as both a rock of integrity and a pathfinder for new ways of seeing culture, communication, class and democracy

He shows us the language and imagery, the beliefs and developed ideas, the hidden assumptions and class biases, and the 'structures of feeling' of literally hundreds of writers, major and minor, poets and pamphleteers, geniuses and hacks. . . . His erudition is immense

There is something Hardyesque in the tragic momentum of this story

Gripping all the way to its unexpected end

A perfectly judged story of people living hard, narrow lives

Hill's beautiful, soulful descriptions of pit village life make this every bit as gripping as her longer spine-chilling stories

In this taught, tense story, written with that unsparing economy which is such a feature of Hill's recent fiction, everyone longs to escape... Ted is thoughtful, compassionate, loving and misguidedly chivalrous... The sparseness of Hill's style provides the perfect medium for exploring his predicament

Hill's taut prose exudes a constant darkness... you are left unsettled and haunted by the seeming inevitability of their troubled lives

Taut, tense story, written with that unsparing economy which is such a feature of Hill's recent fiction

The versatile Hill tells a perfectly judged story of people living hard, narrow lives

So well-written, so deeply imagined, that the reader will find delight even in the encircling gloom. Love may not conquer all, but Art can

[Hill] does what all good writers must set out to do: she made me read until I had the answer

Hill’s sparse style provides the perfect medium for exploring this family’s predicament

Hill does a wonderful job of evoking life in this enclosed community

A masterpiece of economy and control