Raymond Williams was a cultural critic, commentator, and professor. He is the author of several books, including Border Country, The Country and the City, Culture and Society, Keywords, Loyalties, and People of the Black Mountains. Kim Howells is a British Labour Party politician, who was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Pontypridd from 1989 to 2010, and held a number of ministerial positions within the Government, including Minister for the Middle East in the Foreign Office (2005-2008) and Minister of State (2003-2004). Raymond Williams was born in the Welsh border village of Pandy in 1921. He was educated at Abergavenny Grammar School and at Trinity College, Cambridge and he served in the Second World War as a Captain in the 21st Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery. After the war he began an influential career in education with the Extra Mural Department at Oxford University. His life-long concern with the interface between social development and cultural process marked him out as one of the most perceptive and influential intellectual figures of his generation.He returned to Cambridge as a Lecturer in 1961 and was appointed its first Professor of Drama in 1974.

His best-known publications include Culture and Society (1958), The Long Revolution (1961), The Country and the City (1973), Keywords (1976) and Marxism and Literature (1977).Raymond Williams was an acclaimed cultural critic and commentator but he considered all of his writing, including fiction, to be connected. Border Country (1960) was the first of a trilogy of novels with a predominantly Welsh theme or setting, and his engagement with Wales continued in the political thriller The Volunteers (1978), Loyalties (1985) and the massive two-volume People of the Black Mountains (1988-90). He died in 1988.