On June 30, 1945, the Jersey Evening Post on the Channel Island of Jersey ran a story boldly titled “Sentenced to Death by Island Nazis: The Story of Two Gallant Frenchwomen.” It was an interview with French Surrealist photographers, writers, sculptors, political activists, Resistance fighters, and life partners Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) and Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe), just over a month after their release from Gloucester Street Prison in St. Helier, where they had been serving several sentences (including an imminent death sentence) for their Resistance activities on the island in the early 1940s

In January 1940, amid the confusion of wartime London, the Sadler’s Wells Ballet opened its somewhat cautious season with a premiere of Frederick Ashton’s new work Dante Sonata. [1] Conceived after the September 1939 declaration of war, the ballet is Ashton’s response to the developing events of the Second World War. It is a dark, relentless, and violent work with overtones of romantic melancholy that emphasizes nineteenth-century artists’ engagement with Dante’s Divine Comedy. It would become...