Notice bibliographique
- Notice
Type(s) de contenu et mode(s) de consultation : Texte noté : sans médiation
Auteur(s) : Burke, David (19..-.... ; historien)
Titre(s) : The Lawn Road Flats [Texte imprimé] : spies, writers and artists / David Burke
Publication : Woodbridge (GB) : the Boydell press, copyright 2014
Description matérielle : 1 vol. (XX-271 p.-[16] p. de pl.) : ill. ; 25 cm
Collection : History of British intelligence, ISSN 1756-5685
Lien à la collection : History of British intelligence
Note(s) : Bibliogr. p. 255-261. Index
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. There were 32 Flats in all, and
they became a haunt of some of the most prominent Soviet agents working against Britain
in the 1930s and 40s, among them Arnold Deutsch, the controller of the group of Cambridge
spies who came to be known as the "Magnificent Five" after the Western movie 'The
Magnificent Seven'; the photographer Edith Tudor-Hart; and Melita Norwood, the longest-serving
Soviet spy in British espionage history. However, it wasn't only spies who were attracted
to the Lawn Road Flats, the Bauhaus exiles Walter Gropius, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and
Marcel Breuer; the pre-historian V. Gordon Childe; and the poet (and Bletchley Park
intelligence officer) Charles Brasch all made their way there. A number of British
artists, sculptors and writers were also drawn to the Flats, among them the sculptor
and painter Henry Moore; the novelist Nicholas Monsarrat; and the crime writer Agatha
Christie, who wrote her only spy novel 'N or M? in the Flats'. The Isokon building
boasted its own restaurant and dining club, where many of the Flats' most famous residents
rubbed shoulders with some of the most dangerous communist spies ever to operate in
Britain
Sujet(s) : Artistes -- Habitations -- Londres (GB) -- 20e siècle
Espions -- Habitations -- Londres (GB) -- 20e siècle
Espionnage soviétique -- Grande-Bretagne -- 20e siècle
Londres (GB) -- Isokon Building
Indice(s) Dewey :
327.124 70092 (23e éd.) = Espionnage et subversion - Europe de l'Est Russie - Biographie
Identifiants, prix et caractéristiques : ISBN 9781843837831. - ISBN 1843837838 (rel.)
Identifiant de la notice : ark:/12148/cb45665851r
Notice n° :
FRBNF45665851
(notice reprise d'un réservoir extérieur)
Table des matières : Prologue ; Remembrance of things past: Hampstead man among 'The Modernists' ; National
planning for the future and the arrival of Walter Gropius ; 1935: 'Art crystallises
the emotions of an age'. Musicology and the art of espionage ; Arnold Deutsch, Kim
Philby and Austro-Marxism ; The Isobar, Half-Hundred Club and the arrival of Sonya
; The plot thickens: Jurgen Kuczynski, Agatha Christie and Colletts Bookshop ; Refugees,
the Kuczynski network, Churchill and Operation Barbarossa ; Klaus Fuchs, Rothstein
once more, and Charles Brasch ; Vere Gordon Childe ; The New Statesman, Ho Chi Minh
and the end of an era ; Epilogue.
