John Walsh’s exemplar, in this hugely entertaining saunter around the by-ways of dandyism (12-16 February), was the legendary French poet Gérard de Nerval whose habit it was to walk the boulevards of 1840s Paris accompanied by a pet lobster. Thibault, his appeal resting on the fact that, as Nerval once put it, “he doesn’t answer back and he knows the secrets of the deep”, was, as Walsh alliteratively put it, “a blue-black flag of flamboyance”.