Richard Hoggart, who has died aged 95, opened his autobiography by saying: "This is an attempt to make, out of a personal story, a sense rather more than the personal." Virtually all his writing had the same touch, and across a spread of 40 years it produced some of the most penetrating, vivid and durable cultural commentary of the time.
Hoggart's classic, The Uses of Literacy (1956), is firm in its place among the great books of the 20th century. It gave an immensely detailed picture, lit up with knowledge and affection, of British urban working-class people in the years spanning the second world war. Hoggart caught them at the point where their lives, values and culture were being changed by postwar advertising, mass media influences and Americanisation. He was one of them and always remained so in his loyalties.
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