It felt like a glimpse not just of Stuart Hall’s library, but of the library of an era. After Samuel’s ‘lost world of British Communism’, perhaps this is ‘the vintage world of British Cultural Studies’. That intersection of education, crime, society, media seems so poignantly representative of Hall, but he in turn thus feels representative of a milieu and period. Admittedly, a few texts here were more contemporary, from the last twenty years – but not many. The general impression was of a historic deposit, from a world three, four and five decades back in which people at polytechnics, art schools and new universities worked furiously to think these issues through and produce this printed stuff – often pamphlets and articles, as well as full-blown books
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