This book was inspired by Raymond Williams’ (1983[1976]) identification of creativity as a keyword in culture and society. Williams discerned that, due to its semantic latitude and interpretive flexibility, creativity was losing its meaning: he suggested that it would be ‘a brave man’ (sic) who would attempt to provide a definition. Although I make no claims to being Williams’ ‘brave man’, nor do I proffer a definitive definition, this book does attempt to inform our understanding of this contemporary keyword. Through tracing creativity’s semantic changes, the book identified wider social, cultural and political debates in which this word is implicated. Through this, it not only illustrated how its manifestations across three policy areas reflected and legitimated overlapping political and economic ideologies, but related these to wider social and cultural transformations. This approach drew on Williams’ cultural materialism which he first used in Culture and Society (1984 [1958]), for which Keywords was initially intended as an appendix, before his editor’s intervention (Williams, 1983 [1976]). This book has drawn on Culture and Society, as both a resource and as a methodological template. As with Williams’ analysis, the book borrowed from a range of academic disciplines—sociology, philosophy and social psychology—to explore the trajectory of creativity in three areas of policy: culture, urban and education. Through this analysis, the book contributes to the ‘discursive struggle’ over creativity’s definition. This struggle is part of a wider attempt to forge a new ‘creative imaginary’ (O’Connor, 2024, p. 159), where creativity and culture are celebrated because they make us human, not because they make us money.