The tin foil hat existed in fiction before it became the universal uniform of conspiracy culture, appearing as protection against telepathic control in a startlingly prescient 1926 story. A century later, the homemade metal helmet has become visual shorthand for everything from alien signals and government mind control to Wi-Fi paranoia.

Antonin Artaud called his revolutionary idea the Theatre of Cruelty, a phrase that has been misunderstood almost ever since. What he actually wanted was stranger and more ambitious: theatre powerful enough to attack the senses, bypass polite reason and leave an audience genuinely changed.

The Hand of Glory was supposedly fashioned from a hanged criminal’s severed hand and carried by burglars to keep entire households supernaturally asleep. Behind that magnificent piece of occupational overkill lies centuries of European folklore, magical grimoires and one unsettling object still preserved in a Yorkshire museum.