Sometimes there is a risk that I take liberties with regular readers of this column — asking you to piece together the weekly instalments of a fragmented miniseries, like a drunk uncle who leaves mid-sentence after Sunday lunch and then comes back the next Sunday asking, “now, where was I? Oh yes, as I was saying ...”

For this I apologise. Nevertheless ... as I was saying last week, there’s more to surrealism than Salvador Dalí. Even in traditional art-historical accounts, surrealism was a complicated arts movement with multiple manifestos and factions, leaders and exiles — each with their own relationship to European politics in the wake of the World War 1. But this in itself is a simplification...