Paul Hoggart

Richard Hoggart: My father's legacy

This is an edited and expanded text of a talk given at 'In the footsteps of giants: Remembering Stuart Hall, Richard Hoggart and John Tulloch', the annual conference of the Institute of Communication Ethics, held at the Frontline Club, London, on Friday 24 October 2014. The material is largely personal and anecdotal, drawn from a lifetime of conversations, rather than scholarly or academic. However, I have sought to address some broader issues too. These include the various areas of my father's influence: the effect of the autobiographical writing in The uses of literacy; the relative value of his English 'left-Leavisite' approach as opposed to cultural analysis influenced by continental, especially late Marxist theory; his various roles in public life and his long-standing mistrust of commercial populism.

Keywords: Richard Hoggart, scholarship boys, Cultural Studies, public intellectuals, Stuart Hall

Note on the contributor

Paul Hoggart was educated in Hull, Leicester and Birmingham where he attended King Edward VI's Boy's School. He read English at York University, undertook research into popular literature at Leicester University and tutored for the Open University while lecturing in English and Media Studies in London colleges of Further Education. In the 1990s he moved into freelance journalism, including a long spell as a television critic, columnist and feature-writer for The Times. He has also written for the Observer, the Guardian, the Independent, the Telegraph, Broadcast magazine, Radio Times, the Stage and Newsweek. His first novel A man against a background of flames, was published in 2013.