What’s the link between extreme politics and apology? The painter and writer Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) was central to interwar British culture but his so-called ‘flirtation’ with fascism tarnished his reputation, and he became victim of what we now call cancel culture. Yet his penitent anti-fascist writings of the 1940s and 1950s are almost unknown, and he remains unappreciated as a radical critic of authority. Nathan Waddell is Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham.