Indeed, one might go back even further, and understand King Arthur as a kind of Nigel Farage, holding back those evil Saxons intent on imposing their primitive religion and tongue-twisting language on the natives, as well as stealing their land.

More sober voices generally welcome the effect these immigrants have had, on the country’s economy, culture and cuisine, however much they vary. In The Alienation Effect (Allen Lane), Owen Hatherley focuses on one wave, that of the refugees from totalitarianism, that is just passing out of living memory and into the realm of historical study. (One might mention the death, late last year of the painter Frank Auerbach, one of the last survivors of the kindertransport, through which Jewish children, leaving their parents behind and often separated from their siblings, could come in the UK).

The Alienation Effect by Owen Hatherley (Image: Antonio Olmos)

Given this particular moment, and the extensive influence this group had on British cultural and intellectual life, it is a crucial subject. Hatherley has thrown himself diligently into the task. Evident enthusiasm and presumably years of research have resulted in more than 500 pages packed with information about names, some famous and others certainly new to me. That may be because he focuses on four main fields of cultural activity: film and photography; books, their design, publishing and authorship; fine arts; and architecture and planning. Only in the latter do I have expertise; my knowledge of the others is based on anecdote and curiosity. So in the film and photography section, well-known names like Zoltan and Alexander Korda and Emeric (originally Imre) Pressburger rub shoulders with Stefan Lorant, a photo-journalist who had edited popular a pictorial magazine in Munich, before, via a spell in a Nazi prison, setting up the hugely influential Picture Post in the UK, with the backing of publisher Edward Hulton. Lorant published writers like JB Priestley, Dorothy Parker and George Bernard Shaw, but the real magazine stars were the photographers, like Bert Hardy and fellow refugees Kurt Hutton and Felix Man.

Picture Post was left of centre, drawing attention to deteriorating conditions in continental Europe and publishing (after Lorant’s departure) its Plan for Britain, a forerunner of the Beveridge Report that become a cornerstone of the post war Welfare State. In what was a sadly typical story, Lorant was denied British citizenship and left for the US, where he died in 1997. But Picture Post certainly wove itself into the fabric of British society, just as the Kordas and Pressburger with his British collaborator Michael Powell, set a pattern for British cinema.

For me the most satisfying of these four sections is the one on typography and book design. In a chapter called ‘The Radical Autodidact’s Bookshelf’, Hatherley takes us through the sort of library a mid-century intellectual of no great wealth (books could be had, he points out, for the cost of a packet of fags or a pint of beer) might have collected: from the still familiar Penguin classics to the Pelican History of Art, the Everyman’s Library, The Left Book Club and Faber books of important poetry. For each, distinctive typography gave them a clear identity, and in all cases but Everyman, designed by emigres like Jan Tschichold and Hans Schmoller. ‘With a bookshelf like this,’ writes Hatherley, ‘a person of modest means could have given themselves an entire university education’, to some extent visual as well as literary. How different this is to the origins of Aby Warburg’s magnificent library, founded on the childhood pact between Aby and his brother Max that in return for him giving up the right as the eldest to run the family bank, Max would buy him every book he ever wanted – ‘a large blank cheque’, opined Max at Aby’s funeral.

One reason why this is the most satisfying section is that this is precisely the aim of so much Weimar and mid-century Mitteleuropische intellectual activity: to make the most sophisticated ideas available to all, in attractive but unabridged form. These publishers succeeded and in some cases continue to do so.

Almost equally enlightening is a chapter on ‘New Ways of Seeing Old Art’. This deals with the explosion of ‘art history’ as a discipline, which was largely if not entirely driven by emigres: Nikolaus Pevsner, Rudolf Wittkower, Leopold Ettlinger, Oxford’s first professor of art history Edgar Wind, and of course the legendary Warburg Library compared by its founder’s collaborators Fritz Saxl and Gertrude Bing. Modernist art was not unknown in Britain in the 1930s, Roger Fry and Clive Bell had organised exhibitions of Post Impressionism before World War I which attracted a few collectors like the Sadleirs and the Stoops. But the erudition of home-grown scholars like Kenneth Clark, Herbert Reed and Anthony Blunt was massively and highly effectively supplemented by the incomers, and their kunstwissenschaftlich mentality. It even impinged on architecture, with Wittkower’s heroic study of the intellectual basis of Renaissance architecture, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, providing impetus for the Smithsons and Jim Stirling to argue for a rigorous approach to design.

Against this, the story of architecture and planning is mildly disappointing. Despite the great efforts and very significant amount of talent the physical environment that emerged in the UK from the mid 20th century with considerable influence from the emigre community may have been preferable – certainly in individual units – than what preceded it, but it despite a very small number of triumphs it never succeeded in fulfilling the promises made by its progenitors or the expectations they produced in the public.

This section also shows a weakness in Hatherley’s methodology. While it is uncontroversial to believe, as Hatherley clearly does, that the immigrants Erno Goldfinger and Berthold Lubetkin were head and shoulders above their British contemporaries – and indeed most other immigrants – this conventional line deserves some nuance. At times one senses the author itching to claim ‘immigrants good, natives bad’, though to be fair he does not succumb to it. And you would have to be some way along ‘the spectrum’ to take serious offence at the occasional factual infelicities given the extent of new information Hatherley has marshalled, but for the record Queen Camilla is a grand-daughter, not a niece of the critic Morton Shand, and Lubetkin’s Highpoint is not opposite another tower block (it is in any case more slab than tower) by the deservedly uncelebrated Guy Morgan. His Cholmondeley Court is a good ten minutes’ walk away.

More important to my mind is a need to understand the context in Britain – where and why was modernism accepted and not accepted. Here the picture becomes more interesting, as clients for modernist design in the 1930s included the Flower family, who over the course of the 19th century transformed from yeoman farmers into successful brewers, rich enough to launch the Shakespeare ‘industry’ in Stratford-upon-Avon for the bard’s tercentenary in 1864, to fund it for its first few decades and remain its dominate force well into the second half of the 20th century. They also include a scion of the plutocratically rich and reactionary Harmsworth family, and even Eton College. This suggests some degree of rapprochement between a form of culture of which the Establishment approved and even members of that Establishment itself, and modernism. The immigrants did not land on completely barren soil: Gropius even had a sniff of work for Christ’s College Cambridge.

Another unfortunate lacuna is a failure to identify and differentiate both the waves of immigration, especially those close in time, and the at least indicate other areas that benefited from immigrant input. The immediately preceding wave of largely Jewish migration included people who descendants transformed business and in the names of Wolfson, Clore and Wohl, reshaped art patronage, as well as produced significant artists like Isaac Rosenberg, David Bomberg and Mark Gertler.

It is of course reasonable and necessary to limit the subject field, and Hatherley is clear that this is to visual and physical products, but given that the meta-narrative is the overall reshaping of British public life, some scoping of the total field would be welcome and appropriate. To be fair, Hatherley does regret his inability to cover adequately the impact on music, despite the odd mention of Edinburgh Festival and Glyndebourne founder Rudolf Byng. But three members of the legendary Amadeus Quartet were immigrants who met during their internment. In medicine the spinal injury pioneer Ludwig Guttmann transformed his field and founded what has become the Paralympics. Rudolf Peierls and Max Fritsch, exiled from Germany at Birmingham University, wrote a seminal paper on nuclear fission which so alarmed Einstein that he in wrote to Roosevelt and, obtaining an audience with the President, persuaded him to launch the Manhattan Project.

The author does, after all, go off his own piste with excursions into economics. But this seems largely motivated by his hatred for F A Hayek, and in the particular the influence he held over the ‘extremist’ – a lapse into the meaningless cliches of the contemporary Left – prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

Clearly the transformation of British (and indeed global) society had many corollaries beyond the visual arts and there are more books to be written; Hatherley has certainly penned a good one, but had he given just a little more grounding it might have been great.