After an almost Mozartian overture, Gruber delivered four songs whose lucid textures included echoes of Weill. 1932 was a more predictable agitprop piece with such resounding titles as “In Praise of Dialectic”. His music has not gained the popularity of his contemporary Kurt Weill, but this centenary day gave an idea of its breadth and stature. Chamber music, discussions, a new film of the composer’s life, “worker’s choruses”, etc, culminated in a concert by the London Sinfonietta under the extraordinary Viennese composer, conductor and Eisler enthusiast HK Gruber. Eisler’s Kleine Sinfonie, Op 29, had remarkable clarity and concentration – and something of the urgency and driving quality of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony, but without that work’s curiously clotted character. The vast majority of these characters belong to that “non-profit-making counter-culture” which both intrigues the author and causes him a good deal of participatory amusement.

Reality, Richardson writes, “hovered slightly off the ground”.Now this is slightly worrying to someone like myself, due – subject to survey and contract – to move to Brighton very shortly. But even in this state of apprehension, it is impossible to resist the stories through which the themes, and characters, of the book are bodied out. Starting modestly, at pub level, as memories and tales of small-scale quests for information, they swell and grow until by the end we are offered almost nothing except story interwoven with story.Many deal with the living characters around him. But Kipling, Virginia Woolf (cremated here), the Boulting Brothers, Brian Behan (very much alive, and subject of the funniest of all the stories), the great presiding genius Graham Greene himself, even – and especially – the painter of Breakfast in Brighton, all hover a little way above the ground, caught up in Richardson’s gentle illusionism.

His voice very often speaks directly for the voices of the other storytellers. Though seemingly small in scale, this is a surprisingly ambitious book, full of good-fun phrasing and those curious factive fictions that lurk on the border between literature and human topography.. Eisler is not a household name nowadays – star pupil of Schoenberg, composer of film, theatre and abstract music, very much part of the left-wing agitprop movement of the Twenties and Thirties, he collaborated with Brecht, fled the Nazi terror in Europe, only to be ejected from America during the McCarthy era, and settled finally in East Berlin as composer laureate of the German Communist regime. But more important, it is a place that specialises in tolerance.Richardson touches only briefly on what you might call current affairs, with an examination of the plight of the local fishermen and their families, condemned to poverty and obliged to live in the most run-down and peripheral estates.

Otherwise, there parade through his pages all kinds and conditions of quaint and often louche individuals, young but more often old, lively, seedy, sad, demented, straight and gay, usually boozy, often visionary and, with alarming frequency, aspiring – at least – to the psychic.One of the pleasures of the book is its cumulative listing of human types. Escape!”
For anyone brought up in that period, the first duty was to flee the country – or, if not, to go for the next best thing That was exotic, endlessly sexy Brighton. Even today, Brighton still emerges as a beacon of visual freedom, of sunshine, colour, air and sea, with “Turner’s light and Canaletto’s colours” It’s still sexy, by the author’s own account. Say that I have a deeper side and I owe it all to Judy and Jeffery, my bohemian parents.” Done. Anything else? Emma considers: “You could say you’re proud of me.” OK.