A one-man manifesto

Herbert Read was a poet, literary critic, educationalist, philosopher, art critic, a historian of modern art and design and its foremost propagandist in Britain. He was also an articulate and prolific anarchist. From his declaration of anarchism in 1937 until his acceptance of a knighthood in 1953, Read contributed to the anarchist press articles, book reviews and poems. This volume gathers together all of these, mostly for the first time, along with three of his pamphlets for Freedom Press: The Education of Free Men; Freedom – Is It a Crime?; and Art and the Evolution of Man. In total, the contents range across most of his interests and constitute a very attractive, frequently perceptive and sometimes profound One-Man Manifesto. By way of a final chapter, Goodway includes Read’s statement justifying his acceptance of a knighthood for services to literature, an act for which, it now seems, his wife was largely responsible but which aroused indignation and anger at the time among many in the anarchist movement. Yet he espoused his anarchist beliefs to the end, despite his waning influence in the art scene. The anarchists, it could be said, had the best of his life.