Paul Kildea

In the winter of 1937–38, Bertolt Brecht, a refugee from National Socialism, lived in furious exile in Svendborg, a small town on the Danish island of Funen. There he wrote and compiled a collection of poems under the working title ‘Gedichte im Exil’ (Poems in Exile). Sometime between galleys and the poet’s move to Sweden following the Munich Agreement, the book was renamed Svendborger Gedichte, the second section of which begins with a simple motto:

The smallest, dullest link in the fateful chain binding John F. Kennedy and his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald is that both men were big fans of the fictional spy James Bond. In the immediate aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, when investigators searched the tiny boarding room in Dallas that Oswald rented for $8 per week, they found the four Bond books that citizen Oswald had assiduously borrowed from a local library.

One of these was From Russia with Love, Ian Fleming’s novel from 1957, which has at its heart the cat-and-mouse relationship between Bond and the crack SMERSH assassin Donovan Grant, who is tasked and determined to take out Bond, and with him the agency he represents.

You could hardly ask for a better tour guide through the artistic travails and triumphs of the twentieth century. Born as the previous century was closing its shutters, Noël Coward dominated the London stage in the interwar years, butted heads with the Angry Young Men in the 1950s, before wrenching victory from the jaws of disfavour in his final years in a series of stunning revivals.

In late March 1941, more than six months into the relentless German aerial campaign that was then destroying great swaths of London’s fabric and spirit, Virginia Woolf filled the pockets of her heavy overcoat with stones and waded into the River Ouse. Her suicide occurs halfway through Will Loxley’s scattergun study of English writers and writing during the war, though its inevitability haunts the first half of the book, as claustrophobic as the pea-soupers that had defined London’s self-image in the centuries before the Blitz took on that singular responsibility.

In 2002 the English filmmaker John Bridcut visited The Red House in Aldeburgh, the archive housing the papers of Benjamin Britten and his long-time partner, Peter Pears. Bridcut was early in his research for a project he would realise two years later as the documentary film Britten’s Children, and then, after another two years, as a book of the same name. I was then head of music at the Aldeburgh Festival, with a few books of my own on Britten under my belt. Partly because the topic interested me and partly because I was soon to leave Aldeburgh, I sidestepped the archive’s historical rectitude regarding Britten’s sexuality and told John that he really needed to track down and interview Wulff Scherchen, Britten’s lover in 1938, who had moved to Australia and was now known as John Woolford. I dug up the last address we had on file for him and left Bridcut to it.

At a sports carnival early in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall, the schnockered schoolmaster Prendergast, unsteadily wielding a starting pistol, shoots poor Lord Tangent in the foot. Thereafter, Tangent barely appears in the narrative, with only a sentence now and then charting his slow medical decline. ‘Everybody else, however, was there except little Lord Tangent, whose foot was being amputated in a local nursing home.’ And later still: ‘It’s maddenin’ Tangent having died just at this time,’ some old sea dog mutters.

Arnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin were two of the greatest architects of twentieth-century art music, each of them simultaneously an agent of continuity and disruption. The disruption is easy enough to chart: Schoenberg’s complete rewiring of tonality’s motherboard; Gershwin’s successful integration of jazz and symphonic music (more successful than the integration into American society of the greatest exponents of this same music). Although the continuity in each instance is slightly more nebulous, it is equally as compelling.