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selling by the millions each year, they are truly universal stories. It is impossible not to see Andersen – the gawky outsider whose love remained unrequited – in the tales of the Little Mermaid or the Ugly Duckling. Perhaps because the unhappiness of his childhood meant he was never able to ‘grow up’ properly in his personal life, his best and most powerful writing was always for children.

     
    In most of the lives in this chapter the death or absence of a father operated subconsciously in shaping the pattern of the life. In the case of Salvador Dalí (1904–89), it was flamboyantly selfconscious. Dalí set out purposely to annoy and punish his father, who was a respectable lawyer and strict disciplinarian. The young Salvador deliberately wet his bed until he was eight, and developed a lifelong scatological obsession, depositing faeces all over the house. To further infuriate his father, he also developed illegible handwriting – in reality, he could write perfectly well. At school, again, just to annoy his father, he pretended not to know things.
    The generous interpretation is that this was a form of attention-seeking. The circumstances of his birth were unusual.His parents had lost their first son – also called Salvador – only nine months and ten days earlier. He had been only two years old and the parents never fully recovered from the trauma. They talked continually of their lost ‘genius’, hung a photograph of him over their bed and regularly took the ‘new’ Salvador to visit the grave. It was all very disturbing for the young Dalí, who was made to feel he was somehow a reincarnation of his elder brother.
    He grew up an unusually fearful child, plunging into fits of hysteria if he was touched, or saw a grasshopper or, like Andersen, a naked female body (this wasn’t helped by his father keeping an illustrated medical textbook on venereal disease on the piano to terrify him). But like all the lives in this chapter he had an exaggerated sense of his own importance, dreaming, as Freud and Byron had done, of becoming a great hero:
    At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since .
     
    Dalí’s grandiose self-assurance gathered pace during his teens. But, for all the posturing, he was prodigiously gifted, and was able to paint and draw with a classical precision that few of his contemporaries could match. As his mother remarked of his childhood sketches: ‘When he says he’ll draw a swan, he draws a swan, and when he says he’ll do a duck, it’s a duck.’ At the Royal Academy in Madrid, he got himself expelled for refusing to take an oral exam. He wrote in explanation,
    I am very sorry but I am infinitely more intelligent than these three professors, and I therefore refuse to be examined by them. I know this subject much too well .
     

    His relationship with his father, always strained, deteriorated further after his mother died when he was seventeen. Dalí would call this ‘the greatest blow I had experienced in my life’. Eight years later, in 1929, things came to a head when his father was made aware of an early Surrealist sketch by Dalí called Sacred Heart which contained an outline of Christ covered by the words: Sometimes I Spit with Pleasure on the Portrait of My Mother . His father asked him to renounce it publicly. Dalí refused and was physically thrown out of the family home and told never to return (although he claimed he came back soon afterwards with a condom containing his own sperm and handed it to his father saying, ‘Take that. I owe you nothing any more!’).
    The year 1929 proved a turning point for other reasons. It was the year that Dalí joined the Surrealists and made, with Luis Buñuel, the first and best Surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou . The most shocking imagery in the film – an eyeball being sliced open with a razor blade, the dead donkeys on the piano – leapt straight from