Later, as a part-time Fitzrovian, he worked closely with Dylan Thomas, Geoffrey Grigson, Ruthven Todd, Len Lye, John Aldridge RA, Alan Hodge and many others.
While in Germany, during the early part of Hitler's dictatorship, he saw an incident which shocked him all his life: starving inmates of a concentration camp being tormented by local inhabitants, who were throwing bread so that it landed only just beyond the captives' reach.
During the war he worked in London at Broadcasting House for the Political Intelligence Department, using his fluency in French and German; in the North African Campaign, from Alexandria, he continued in the same shadowy organisation, where with Bruno Adler, he wrote radio scripts for a comedy series called 'Kurt and Willy', picked up by Rommel's Afrika Korps.
A fire broke out in the couple's flat in Queens Gate, South Kensington, in 1951; and though all his own writings were saved from the flames, his life's collection of considerable works of reference in art and literature was completely destroyed.
He told his younger brother Angus (then working in the British Army Staff in Vienna) that he was distraught, that the loss 'was like losing his own soul and one which he thought, perhaps, spelt the end of his writing'.