Willett was born in
Hampstead and was educated at
Winchester and
Christ Church, Oxford. He went on to the
Manchester College of Art and Dance, and then to
Vienna, where he studied music (Willett played the
cello) and
stage design. Willett began his career as a theatre designer. However, this career was cut short by
World War II. He served in Intelligence and the Eighth Army, in
North Africa and
Italy. Beginning his war in July 1940 as a
second lieutenant in the
British Army, he ended it just over five years later as a
lieutenant colonel. In August 1942 he was transferred to the
Intelligence Corps, in April 1944 he was
mentioned in dispatches and in June 1945 he was made a
Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). After being demobilised, Willett worked first for
The Manchester Guardian from 1948 to 1951, and then in 1960 he became the deputy to Arthur Crook, the editor of
The Times Literary Supplement. Willett remained there until 1967. That year Methuen published his
Art in a City, the result of his study into art in Liverpool, commissioned by the city's Bluecoat Society of Arts. A pioneering sociological study of art in a single city, it was republished in 2007 by the Bluecoat and Liverpool University Press, with a new introduction by the Bluecoat's artistic director Bryan Biggs that set Willett's prescient study in the context of Liverpool's cultural renaissance on the eve of its year as 2008 European Capital of Culture. From 1970 to 1973, he taught at the
California Institute of the Arts as a Bertolt Brecht scholar. ==Later life==