I've been thinking about Sir Herbert Read for the last couple of days. An interesting character of the same generation as Orwell and T.S. Elliot. He fought in the First World War and was a vociferous pacifist in the Second. He has the wonderful distinction of having been expelled from the British Anarchist Society (presumably for being insufficiently anarchistic, as he accepted a knighthood from Winston Churchill, who, I'm sure, must have appreciated the joke).

This is an image Herbert Read would have approved of. He was basically an art critic and poet with a sensitive and very humanistic outlook. A quote:

"It is of the essence of genius to be uncommitted to any abstraction."

In an age that was driven by and to abstractions, he was always ready to recognize the significance of the concrete and the individual. Unlike some of his generation, soviet style socialism didn't fool him for very long.