Cool interview, it's illuminating when one finds description that are this early, from before globalization became such an omnipresent household word. (Ignatieff's own book, "The Russian Album" about his family history and the journey of his parents and grandparents from imperial Russia to Britain and Canada - his grandfather was a government minister under Nicholas II and they emigrated during the Russian Civil War - is also a very good memoir, illuminating and thoughtful).

Well done Stuart Hall. This is almost the 90's and showing that multi-culture is a good thing that we still fight for today.

The interviewer, Michael Ignatieff, later served as Canada's Leader of the Opposition. His successor as Liberal Party leader? Justin Trudeau.

Stuart Hall - lyrical speaker

Isn't it obvious the cultural effect of globalisation is a mono-culture i.e. everyone is the same and everyone has the same culture. And you could say that's really the death of culture. I'll leave you to decide whether that's a good thing or not. Personally it's not a world I'd want to live in.

It's sad. At the time of that production, no one would have thought the conversation, or the participants, to be particularly intelligent or eloquent, but in comparison with anything one might find today, they were quite so.

The rot had already set in by the late 1980s

I was taught by Stuart Hall in the late 60s / early 70s when, with Richard Hoggart, he set up the Centre For Contemporary Studies at Birmingham University. Looking back on those days, I realise that the 'long march through the institutions' was already well under way. We young innocents were not so much being (willingly) indoctrinated, as almost being groomed by a very suave and plausible Marxist. Hoggart's vaguely stated aim for the Centre was to bring to bear the sensibilities of literary criticism on aspects of contemporary culture. Hall's agenda was more subversive; Cut to the present day - Academia is almost exclusively left-wing, the mission is to indoctrinate rather than educate, the baton of the Long March passed on to a new generation of clones incapable of independent thinking, fresh from courses with 'studies' in their names. Not just Contemporary Cultural Studies now, but also Gender Studies, Wimmins' Studies, Race Studies, Black Studies, Grievance Studies ......