The merger ended after recording In Praise of Learning when Peter Blegvad and Anthony Moore from Slapp Happy left the group.

[1] Printed on the back of the album cover is filmmaker John Grierson's quote "Art is not a mirror – it is a hammer", and the Tim Hodgkinson 16-minute composition "Living in the Heart of the Beast" made explicit the band's left-wing political leanings, with Dagmar Krause's powerful voice adding a new dimension to their music.

Hegarty and Halliwel suggest that Smith's red sock is "an antidote" to the "extravagant" album cover art work of commercial progressive rock bands.

This remix was used in the 1991 East Side Digital Records CD issue, with one extra track, "Lovers of Gold" (an alternate version of "Beginning: The Long March" by Chris Cutler).

[17] In 2000 Recommended Records and East Side Digital issued a remastered version of In Praise of Learning on CD with the original 1975 mix and without the bonus track.

[18] Music journalist Robert Christgau described the album's lyrics as "literary if not pompous in print", but said Krause's "abrasively arty, Weill-derived" singing "manage[s] to find a context for [the] words".

[19] In another review of the album in Let It Rock, Dave Laing said that Krause's vocals have the same "brittle style" that American singer and songwriter Judy Collins used in "Pirate Jenny" and the Marat/Sade.

With quotes from Mao Zedong, "no punches [are] pulled ... all the cards are on the table", although Lake did feel that Henry Cow tend to be "over-scholarly" at times.

[6] MacDonald described "War" as "downbeat mythologising and exploding musique concrete" that "heaves and thrashes like an octopus caught in a ship's propellor [sic]".

"Living in the Heart of the Beast" also begins well, but despite "a remarkable instrumental interlude", it "sinks awkwardly to earth beneath the would-be climactic exhortations of the finale".