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Strang talks about the progressive avant-garde art world of the 1930s in Edinburgh, Scotland which centered on three men and three institutions. Besides the efforts of Herbert Read, Hubert Wellington and Stanley Cursiter at the university, art college and national galleries, Edinburgh's avant-garde art world of the 1930s consisted of the activities of many other individuals and institutions, not least the progressive an which Scottish artists were making--and were able to see--in the capital during the decade. Throughout die decade, the Society of Scottish Artists' (SSA) annual exhibitions showcased the best of the country's contemporary art, hung alongside loans of significant European modern art.

According to Wyndham Lewis, he possessed an unenviable knack of providing, at a week’s notice, almost any movement, or sub-movement, in the visual arts, with a neatly-cut party-suit—with which it can appear, appropriately caparisoned, at the cocktail-party thrown by the capitalist who has made it possible, in celebration of the happy event.3 Certainly, his enthusiasm for new artistic and intellectual initiatives at times led Read to make what were, even in his own estimation, some questionable alliances. First encountering Jung in the 1930s, Read quickly became a convert,eventually ending up as the chief editor of his collected works.38 The benefit of Jung’s model as he saw it was that while Freud’s unconscious was as individual and unpredictable as the surrealist art it inspired, Jung’s unconscious was populated by an order of collectively recognized archetypes. [...]without circumventing the quasi-egoist agency of the artist—by the 1940s, Read was able to figure aesthetic judgement as being “the discrimination of effective shapes,” and an individual’s “preference for certain physical laws” as a sign that the unconscious was engaged in “seeking an archetypal order.” [...]when Read replied he openly acknowledged to Gabo that “you express the philosophy which I also believe in”: constructivism, guided by an altruistic form of egoism, chimed closely with the ontology behind of the “community of individuals” that Read had been outlining in his social criticism.43 While he agreed with Gabo that the creative impulse should be essentially egoistic, however, the vocabulary that Read had picked up from Jung also allowed him to channel that egoism towards essentially collectivist ends.

[...]he claims, for example, in his autobiography Annals of Innocence and Experience, first published in 1940, that his anarchist beliefs reach back to his formative years before the First World War. Whatever pull is more powerful at any given moment will command adherence. [...]it is possible to account for such startling paradoxes as flirting with classicism at one moment and embracing romanticism at another, championing avant-garde art and editing the establishment Burlington Magazine, or turning to Anarchism in 1937-38 and accepting a knighthood fifteen years later.5 The point, then, is not to condemn Read's enlistment in the First World War, merely to suggest that, writing as he did in 1940, he could have acknowledged the frenzied pressure of ideological integration to which he had been subject; for other options were open and taken in the summer of 1914, right under his nose. [...]it took the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and the part played by Anarchists in the concomitant social revolution, for Read to break out of his reserve. Quoting from Read's works is no straightforward matter, for the author did not only revise and add but also regrouped his poems in successive Collected Poems (1926, 1946, 1966). [...]the sequence 'The Scene of War' discussed in the following consisted originally of six sections, with roman numerals (1919, 1926 and 1946 versions), before 'My Company' and 'The Execution of Cornelius Vane' were aligned with the others and given the numerals VII and VIII (1966 version).