The Lawn Road Flats: Spies, Writers and ArtistsThe story of a modernist building with a significant place in the history of Soviet espionage in Britain, where communist spies rubbed shoulders with British artists, sculptors and writers The Isokon building, Lawn Road Flats, in Belsize Park on Hampstead's lower slopes, is a remarkable building. The first modernist building in Britain to use reinforced concrete in domestic architecture, its construction demanded new building techniques. But the building was as remarkable for those who took up residence there as for the application of revolutionary building techniques. DAVID BURKEis a historian of intelligence and international relations and author of The Spy Who Came In From the Co-op: Melita Norwood and the Ending of Cold War Espionage (The Boydell Press, 2009). |
Contents
Prologue | 1 |
1 Remembrance of Things Past Hampstead Man among The Modernists | 5 |
2 National Planning for the Future and the Arrival of Walter Gropius | 27 |
Art crystallises the emotions of an age Musicology and the Art of Espionage | 53 |
4 Arnold Deutsch Kim Philby and AustroMarxism | 83 |
5 The Isobar Half Hundred Club and the Arrival of Sonya | 106 |
Jurgen Kuczynski Agatha Christie and Colletts Bookshop | 132 |
7 Refugees The Kuczynski Network Churchill and Operation Barbarossa | 152 |
8 Klaus Fuchs Rothstein once more and Charles Brasch | 171 |
9 Vere Gordon Childe | 194 |
10 The New Statesman Ho Chi Minh and the End of an Era | 208 |
Epilogue | 223 |
Notes | 226 |
255 | |
263 | |