The book takes in popular press debates linked to the annual Royal Academy Summer Exhibition; the changing preferences of the institutionalized avant-garde from the Second World War onwards; the battles fought within colleges of art as a generation of post-war students challenged the skills and commitment of their tutors; and the changing status of figurative art in the post-war period. Spear was committed to a form of social realism but the art he produced for left-wing and pacifist exhibitions and causes had a sophistication, authenticity and humour that flowed from his responses to bravura painting across a broad historical swathe of European art, and from the fact that he was painting what he knew. Spear's geography revolved around the working class culture of Hammersmith in West London and the spectacle of pub and street life. This was a metropolitan life little known to, and largely unrecorded by, his contemporaries.