Stuart Hall was born in Kingston, Jamaica and educated at Oxford University. A pioneering cultural theorist, campaigner, and founding editor of the New Left Review, Hall was one of the most influential and adventurous thinkers of the last half century. He was Director of the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies from 1972, and from 1979 was Professor of Sociology at the Open University. His published work includes The Popular Arts (1964), the co-authored volume Policing the Crisis (1978), The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (1988), and, with Sarat Maharaj, Modernity and Difference (2001).
Bill Schwarz teaches at Queen Mary University of London.
‘Swift, lucid and beautifully turned … a rich resource’ Fred Inglis, Times Higher Education
‘A provocative portrait … reading it is to be assailed by the idea of displacement’ Tim Adams, Observer
‘A thinker that you cannot ignore’ David Lammy
‘A hybrid of memoir and meditation, a spirited voyage around the complexities of race, colour and class. Colin Grant, Guardian
‘My hero’ Diane Abbott
‘One of Britain’s greatest postwar intellectuals – the latest in a very long line of immigrant thinkers, from Wittgenstein to Pevsner, who have infused English academia with fresh creative energy … illuminates not only his own struggles with identity and a sense of place in the world, but also those of postwar Britain and its seemingly endless efforts to come to terms with class, race and empire’ Maria Misra, Financial Times
‘A leading cultural theorist … a hero’ Daily Telegraph
‘An intellectual giant’ Independent