Paris in the 1920s gave Goldfinger the chance to observe the international avant garde at first hand. His own account, characteristically, places him centrally. He frequented the Dôme, the café where the tiny, deaf Adolf Loos (‘ornament is crime’) held court; he knew Man Ray and Lee Miller; Berthold Lubetkin lived in the same building; he was good friends with the photographers Andor Kertész and Bill Brandt as well as most of the leading painters and sculptors. But an enduring sense of his own superiority (as a child, after a poor exam result, he raged that ‘the imbecile failed me’) meant that he wasn’t prepared, as he put it, ‘to kowtow to Picasso’. Nor, when he began to work in partnership as an interior and furniture designer, and took on employees, was he any more generous-spirited. One young American who worked with him briefly, and in whom he had no interest (and of whom he had no memory), was John Cage.