Michael Ayrton (1921-1975) was an English artist and writer, renowned as a painter, printmaker, sculptor and designer, and also as a critic, broadcaster and novelist. His varied output of sculptures, illustrations, poems and stories reveals an obsession with flight, myths, mirrors and mazes. He also wrote and illustrated Tittivulus or the Verbiage Collector, an account of the efforts of a minor devil to collect idle words.