'"One advantage of leaving school at an early age is that one can study subjects of your own choice", wrote Frank Argent, son of a Camberwell labourer. Taking advantage of the public library and early Penguins, he ranged all over the intellectual landscape: Freudian psychology, industrial administration, English literature, political history, Blake, Goethe, Mill, Nietzsche, The Webbs, Bertrand Russell's Essays in Scepticism, and Spengler's "The Decline of the West".'