Dent wrote this unusually reflective letter to Lawrence after his trip to Italy in April 1935. He was desperately tired, and the ‘new period’ in his life was throwing up challenges which undermined his usual self-confidence, replacing it with fears both vague and specific. Travelling abroad was not the escape or liberation it had been, and his other life was being forced back into the shadows. ‘I am always getting calls [in Berlin and Prague] from total strangers, and when I ask their names they reply “Sie kennen mich nicht”, which I find embarrassing, and always fear they are blackmailers.’ Such approaches, whether actually from blackmailers or (more likely) refugees, now upset him badly, confusing as they did the personal with the more distant threat. For the next year, up to the 1936 joint festival and congress at Barcelona, Dent was constantly battered by political forces, especially those government- backed internal ones in the ISCM and ISMR, mustered against him personally and against everything he stood for. The political storms blowing were anti-Semitic, homophobic and populist, the methods undermining, so Dent's depression at this point is entirely understandable, from both professional and personal standpoints.