Susannah Clapp

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...

Hallie​ Flanagan: a woman killed by Congress. Or at least by Congress-approved committee. From 1935 to 1939, Flanagan ran the most extraordinary of stage ventures, a dramatic instance of imagination spurred by political principle. The Federal Theatre Project, set up under FDR’s New Deal to give work to unemployed theatre practitioners, produced more than a thousand plays, estimated...

‘Iago’ (1867)

He is not​ one of her Great Men. After all, he has no beard. Yet the 1867 portrait that Julia Margaret Cameron called ‘Iago’ is her most startling photograph. The face, captured so close up as to suggest a 21st-century candour, has the long features and brooding gaze of Frank Finlay, who played the villain to Laurence Olivier’s grimacing Moor....

When I complain​ it is sexist, the men on the door think I am having a laugh. Every week before being allowed into a theatre I have to prove I’m not dangerous by opening my bag for inspection. Meanwhile my male companion is invariably waved through – though that bulge in his pocket could be a knife.

Thanks to Hannah Carlson, I now regard this ritual as part of a widespread garment...