 After the family returned to their native Glasgow, McCrone was educated at The Glasgow Academy, then went on to read for a degree in Modern Languages at Pembroke College, Cambridge, after which he travelled to Vienna, where he studied singing.Returning to Scotland, he organised the first British performance of Berlioz's "Les Troyens" and was a founding member of the Glasgow Citizen's Theatre, together with his cousin, the playwright Osborne Henry Mavor.Glasgow provided the setting for many of his novels, including the most widely read, "Antimacassar City", "The Philistines" and "The Puritans", begun in 1940 and which were later published as "Wax Fruit