Richard Hoggart

and the prosecution doesn't even cross-examine him.

Then there's Richard Hoggart, the literary scholar.

Hoggart argues that Lawrence's language, shocking though it may initially seem, is essential to what the novelist is trying to do.

He explains that the repeated use of those forbidden words gradually changes the reader's response.

I don't know if we've got it here, but one of my favourite books is called, is it here? The Uses of Literacy.

It was written by a guy called Richard Hoggart, whose son Simon actually was the Guardian's parliamentary sketchwriter.

And he talks about growing up supremely poor in interwar Leeds, and books and literacy were his emancipation, and he was a figure of the left.

And for quite a long time in the 20th century, it was the left with its kind of cardigan-wearing Marxists who believed in the position you're outlining.

But I will tell you roughly what I think.

You're absolutely right that if you go back in time, this wasn't the case.

You mentioned Richard Hoggart, another fantastic book, Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Lives of the British Working Classes.

This great history about working class people essentially trying to educate themselves.

So I began thinking of a plane of affect.

Thinking back, well, at the time I didn't know it, but When I got to the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, I discovered that Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart had both had a highly under-theorized notion.

Williams in the structure of feeling, Hoggart in, as he put it, what does it feel like to live at a certain time and place? Those were the questions they posed to cultural studies.

And I was trying to elaborate it.

Penguin Books fought for the right to publish D. H. Lawrence's novel 30 years after his death.

Among the panel of expert witnesses called by Penguin Books was the writer, Richard Hoggart.

It brought out that anti-intellectual, anti-imaginative... strain in the British ruling class and the sense that people can't be trusted to make their own minds up.

In post-war Britain, social attitudes around sex and morality were shifting.