Susannah Clapp

Not exactly​ an addiction but a compulsion. When I started to write full-time about the theatre, I was fixated on television soaps. Not all of them. I didn’t have an afternoon habit. Just EastEnders, which I had watched from the beginning (and failed to persuade the then editor would be a subject for this paper), Coronation Street and Brookside. I would come home from King Lear or the...

Think​ of a loincloth as an act of diplomacy. The beautiful, fact-crammed catalogue accompanying the British Museum’s Hawaii exhibition (until 25 May) explains that the malo loloa, a long loincloth made of barkcloth, was a metaphor for Hawaii forming alliances. When, just over two hundred years ago, the young King Liholiho (known as Kamehameha II) and Queen Kamāmalu sailed from...

‘Woman and Vegetation’ (1945)

André​ Breton gave one of the best descriptions: ‘the rocket I’ll call Baya’. He also gave some of the worst: ‘a being as frail as she is talented’, ‘the child that is Baya’. Excitement vibrates around the subject of Alice Kaplan’s biography Seeing Baya (Chicago, £21). The artistic gift...

For​ Rimsky-Korsakov, the key of A was clear pink; for Scriabin, it was green. Duke Ellington read the flight patterns of birds as musical phrases and saw the D notes of his baritone saxophonist, Harry Carney, as dark blue hessian. Adam Faith’s last words were ‘Channel 5 is all shit, isn’t it?’

There are nuggets, visual and verbal, at every turn of The Madman’s...

Francis Picabia, ‘Tete de femme’ (c.1941-42)© The Estate of Francis Picabia. Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery.

For a long stretch​ of her long life, Jean Rhys was thought to be dead: drowned in the Seine, they said. For some of it she was thought to be a fraud. In 1949 a neighbour in Beckenham who knew her by the name of her husband (who was a real fraud) accused her of...