Wyndham Lewis, founder of the Vorticist art movement, was always controversial, but I’ve been reading more about him lately and some of his ideas were truly demented and horrible – in books such as The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1928) and Men Without Art (1934). He was elitist, proto-fascist (admired Hitler and Mussolini), racist (anti-black, anti-Semitic), hated popular culture and all democracy and would happily have contemplated the extinction of millions of the deprived and uneducated in favour of rule by the intelligent few who might breed a superior breed of human beings.