Hemingway said he looked like “an unsuccessful rapist”, Paul Nash thought him “strangely sub-human” and to WH Auden he was “that lonely old volcano”. Wyndham Lewis styled himself “The Enemy”, and certainly by the time he had anatomised London society in his satirical novel The Apes of God, he had barely friend or patron left. Broke, bitter and bigoted, Lewis groped his way through the low, dishonest 1930s, blundering from a swastika-emblazoned book on Hitler (“a celibate inhabitant of a modest Alpine chalet – vegetarian, non-smoking ... the most unassuming of men”) in 1931 to an attempt to make amends with the unfortunately titled The Jews: Are They Human? in 1938.

That year the Royal Academy rejected his masterpiece, a portrait of a suited, hunched, inexpressive TS Eliot against a backcloth of phallic scrolls, which manages to be both a monument to the misery of the lonely creative life and an image reflecting Eliot’s vernacular armour of the ordinary man – the essence of his genius.