In 1971 artist Milein Cosman made a quick sketch of her husband, music critic Hans Keller. It is a mass of implicit contradictions. Keller emerges as though straight from an Egon Schiele sitting: there is so much detail and expression caught in so few lines. In life Keller always gave the outward impression that he would have been completely at home with the vivid characters populating the canvases and sketchbooks of Viennese modernist Schiele: the reclining women, their legs wide apart, their labia showing; the nude men barely covered by loincloths; the garish self-portraits and scowling masturbators. Cosman revealed this version of Keller: his hair is wild, barely distinguishable from the background; his nose is in a book or score; his eyebrows high, his Groucho Marx moustache unmistakable. This image is that of the author of “Schoenberg and the Men of the Press” (1950–51); or articles on Stravinsky or Moses und Aron, Freud or psychopathology; or the wounded psychology of contemporary critics: a clear-sighted modernist taking a scythe to foggy English critical thought.

His pedigree demanded it, after all: a Jew in Austria after the Anschluss, he made good his precarious escape to London in 1938 aged nineteen, bringing with him an intellectual and musical heritage he never quite shook. Nor did he want to shake it: no matter how integrated he became, he held on to these formative years and traditions as a cultural map, ever more firmly as events overtook him and his memories morphed, one into the other. In this regard he was a little like the aunts of historian Tony Judt, who had also escaped Hitler and who put the young Judt in his place by politely enquiring of him whether he had read one German classic or another. “Their sense of loss was palpable,” Judt later wrote, “and omnipresent: the German world that had abandoned them was the only one they knew and the only one worth having – its absence was a source of far greater pain than anything that the Nazis had perpetrated.” Theirs was a more polite, nuanced version of the sense of loss expressed by a different émigré, the art critic Alfred Polgar, unhappily holed up in California during the war but determined to live just long enough to “enjoy the end of the awful mess made by that monstrous arsehole” Hitler.

In late September 1938 – in the aftermath of the Anschluss and the German invasion of Austria, and in the fool's-gold glow of the Munich conference – The Times published a delightfully pompous editorial:

Less than two years later, with W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood discovering a brave new American way of life, an epigram was printed in the Spectator (its author rumoured to be the Dean of St Paul's):

This short journey from the public's conscience to its whipping boy of course reflects the change in Britain's and Auden's domestic circumstances; yet it also delineates a public conception of the poet's role in society. This was a relatively new phenomenon – one shaped on the Somme and at Ypres but ultimately refined in the politically turbulent 1930s. Moreover, this public delineation of role came from both sides of the political debate: The Times was the Establishment newspaper, while the Spectator – not yet the right-wing zoo it would delight in being fifty years later – published many young and left-wing intellectuals of the day.