Ludolf and Edith Rosenheim, Denis Devlin's in-laws: The Rosenheims fled Nazi Germany before the war and the Nazis looted their extensive art collection. The critic Theodor Adorno is often quoted as having said that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. He had no wish to soften such a statement, but he also found it necessary to add that “literature must resist this verdict, in other words, be such that its mere existence after Auschwitz is not a surrender to cynicism”. In a world of red-hatted uniforms and rallies from Brazil to India to the US and the scandal of...