He went on to the Manchester College of Art and Dance, and then to Vienna, where he studied music (Willett played the cello) and stage design.
[1] In August 1942 he was transferred to the Intelligence Corps, in April 1944 he was mentioned in dispatches and in June 1945 he was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE).
[1] After being demobilised, Willett worked first for the Manchester Guardian from 1948 to 1951, and then in 1960 he became the deputy to Arthur Crook, the editor of The Times Literary Supplement.
A pioneering sociological study of art in a single city, it was republished in 2007 by the Bluecoat and Liverpool University Press, with a new introduction by the Bluecoat's artistic director Bryan Biggs that set Willett's prescient study in the context of Liverpool's cultural renaissance on the eve of its year as 2008 European Capital of Culture.
After the war, Willett became friends with Brecht himself, although it is said that the friendship got off to a bad start due to a disagreement about the Hitler-Stalin pact, but got back on track after they discovered that they were both interested in Tacitus.