His interests encompassed Russian art, literature and politics which he taught at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies.

[5] Alan Victor Hare (1919–1995) became chairman of the Financial Times as well as a Director of The Economist and the English National Opera.

[7] A shy and sensitive child who loved art, Hare was encouraged in an academic direction by its headmaster William Wyamar Vaughan.

[7] Hare went up to Balliol College, Oxford in 1925 where he studied philosophy, politics and economics obtaining a first class degree.

She had a commission to paint murals for the interior of the British pavilion for the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes.

Gordine left for Paris and was soon commissioned by the Singapore city authorities to decorate the Town Hall with models representing people of six different ethnic backgrounds living in the Malay Peninsula.

[14] The creation of propaganda at the Ministry was thought to have influenced George Orwell whose wife worked in the Censorship Section whilst he worked at the BBC producing Ministry-approved broadcasts[15] The Ministry published a booklet to counter ideological fears of Bolshevism, including claims that the Red Terror was a figment of Nazi imagination.

This inspired George Orwell to leave the BBC and write Animal Farm, which was suppressed by the Ministry until the end of the war.

[8] After the war, Hare was invited to return to the Foreign Office but he devoted himself to an academic life centred on Russian literature, art and culture.

He was a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at the Hoover Institute from 1947–8 where he researched the Russian literary archives at Stanford University.

She specialised in portrait sculptures attracting international admirers from the political, social, artistic, literary and theatrical worlds.

Country Life magazine explained that the setting on Kingston Vale was crucial to the conception of Dorich House: ‘In the first place, the site was a matter of infinite importance; and the one eventually found, with its lovely view over the noble trees of Richmond Park, could hardly be bettered.

From the flat roof the whole panorama of the Park and the distant tree-clad hills unfolds around one: it enables Dora Gordine to work on a figure intended for a garden ornament actually in its intended setting, under the sky…’ Richard died of a heart attack on 14 September 1966 at Dorich House.