Books by Richard Hoggart

Throughout his life, Richard Hoggart has been involved with four main areas: broadcasting, arts policy, education, and social work, all of which he finds have characteristics in common. This collection of essays represents less than a quarter of his essays published over the last two decades

For years Richard Hoggart has observed the oddity of a common speech habit: the fondness for employing ready-made sayings and phrasings whenever we open our mouths, a disinclination to form our own sentences "from scratch," unless that becomes inescapable

This pioneering work examines changes in the life and values of the English working class in response to mass media

This pioneering work examines changes in the life and values of the English working class in response to mass media

Hoggart makes an impassioned argument for Public Service Broadcasting in its truest form, and sees the Public Service ideal as coming increasingly under attack from today's BBC broadcasters. People who seem to believe that the overwhelming function of television today is to entertain.

When a society becomes more affluent, does it lose other values? Are the skills that education and literacy gave millions wasted on consuming pop culture? Do the media coerce us into a world of the superficial and the material - or can they be a force for good? When Richard Hoggart asked these questions in his 1957 book The Uses of Literacy Britain was undergoing huge social change, yet his landmark work has lost none of its pertinence and power today. Hoggart gives a fascinating insight into the close-knit values of Northern England's vanishing working-class communities, and weaves this together with his views on the arrival of a new, homogenous 'mass' US-influenced culture. His headline-grabbing bestseller opened up a whole new area of cultural study and remains essential reading, both as a historical document, and as a commentary on class, poverty and the media.

In this clear-eyed and controversial book he sets himself to take the temperature of the nation at the end of the 20th century - to test its blood for health and heartiness, sample its imagination for largeness amd magnanimity, conduct examinations of its intelligence, judgement and moral sense.

Analyses the nature of human courage, the uses of memory, the true purposes of education, love and charity, and the approach of the Grim Reaper. This book considers the public ideas and events, with examples on family, politics, the intellectual life, beliefs and morals, words and writing. Its arguments are illustrated from life.

This is an exploration of how the English, and particularly working-class English, use the English language. It asks: how far do the British share the same sayings across the social classes? And if each group uses some different ones, are those differences determined by various factors?