ABSTRACT
This paper is about the idea of “culture” itself; about cultural studies in Britain now, and in the recent past; and about the connection of both of these to the practice and writing of history. The account I give (the story I tell) will be partly institutional in focus, to do with forms of school-based and higher education in Britain since the last war; and it will also be text-based. Here, I follow a historiographical tradition laid down by British cultural studies itself (a historiography that this Conference has often evoked): histories of cultural studies, written by its practitioners, usually organize themselves in a particular way, rendering up their own account in terms of the books—always three key-texts: Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, 1957; Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, 1958; and E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, 1963.
