Some years ago I was given a battered keyboard instrument, part of the estate of a refugee Catalan composer called Roberto Gerhard who had lived here in Cambridge. It had once been an elegant square pianoforte straight out of a Jane Austen novel, a Stodart of 1807, in a flame mahogany case, with brass trim and tiny drawers underneath. At some point it had been turned into an ersatz clavichord by chopping off an octave or so from its keyboard and carefully replacing its hammers with nails. It certainly wasn’t at all the kind of instrument you might associate with a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg. Inside the case was a tattered piece of card addressed to ‘Mr Dent, King’s College’. I went to King’s.

That first visit to the Dent archive at King’s was more than revelation; it was dumbfounding. Twenty-six years of diaries and thousands of letters, all only recently catalogued and mostly unread. This respectable and respected Professor of Music, it transpired, had helped his old friend Gerhard to escape from Nazi-occupied Paris, organised a place for him at King’s with a small stipend: everything, in fact, any refugee needed for official refugee status. Moreover, it appeared that Dent had done the same for quite a few others, assisting a substantial chunk of musical Europe on the run, but that was only a tiny part of his story.