As Olivier Todd once said, parents read Tintin after their children: they read Astérix before the children can get their hands on the books.

On a bitter cold morning in January 1939 Auden and Isherwood sailed into New York harbour on board the SS Champlain. After coming through a blizzard off Newfoundland the ship looked like a wedding cake and the mood of our two heroes was correspondingly festive and expectant.

Two decades ago a container ship travelling from Hong Kong to Tacoma, Washington, hit a winter storm and several shipping containers were washed overboard into the North Pacific. Among the lost cargo were 28,800 plastic bath toys: red beavers, green frogs, blue turtles and yellow ducks.

I had counterfeited before. What I didn’t know at the time, and wish I had (it might have eased my conscience), was that my shifty trip to Russia to steal someone else’s jewellers in order to produce fake eggs was very much in keeping with Fabergé’s shadowy history. In June 1923 the imperial Fabergé eggs seized by Red Army troops during the Revolution were put up for sale, along with many other treasures, in a kind of giant garage sale.

Darwin observed and wrote about his children, as did Freud. And so did that particularly unpleasant behaviourist father in the movie Peeping Tom, made around the same time as Dr Milton Rokeach’s dinner table experiment. Rokeach did at least stop once the girls became tearful. But what would happen, he wondered, if he made three men meet and live closely side by side over a period of time, each of whom believed himself to be the one and only Jesus Christ?

Physically huge but strangely weightless, Fabian Lloyd lived a life of indefinition – aliases, disguises, blurrings of fact and fantasy. He was a kind of illusionist, his greatest feat the creation of ‘Arthur Cravan’, his last trick the classic one of vanishing.