How many geniuses of the front rank have excelled equally in two creative fields? There’s William Blake, of course, and perhaps Michelangelo qualifies on the grounds of his marvellous sonnets, but no other figures spring readily to mind. However, a new exhibition at the Royal Academy makes the case for Victor Hugo, who is estimated to have made some four thousand drawings.

All of them are on paper. Most of them are contained in sketchbooks, but some are doodles in the margins of manuscripts. Aside from a few that appeared as engravings in collections of his poetry, virtually none of these images were publicly shown, let alone sold, in Hugo’s lifetime. He seems to have had no formal training, yet his technique was highly sophisticated. He opted for a variety of mediums, chiefly black and brown ink (he used the same pens to write and draw), but also charcoal and wax crayons, and even soot, coffee grounds and fingerprints. Although there may be something profligate and methodless about what he produced, one can’t question the superb craftmanship or the imaginative power that informed it.

Or the egocentricity. A master of rhetoric, Hugo has gone down in history as one of the grandest and noisiest of great writers, massively prolific and politically vociferous on behalf of Humanity (with a capital H). Closer to home, his compassion shrank. His friendships were volcanically volatile, he played the