“... face of the black economy. He mingled with poets who dealt sugar-lumps laced with LSD. He met R.D. Laing, Lyall Watson and became involved with P.J. Proby’s management. He was, so he says, ‘trying to create an alternative society, like all the other arseholes.’ Which is why he was recruited by MI6. He was a natural. Hamilton McMillan (‘Mac’), an old ...”

“... a stable masculine voice so much as searching at the edges of sanity with the likes of R.D. Laing. The other affair was with a psychiatrist from the Maudsley who, she said, had been the love of her life, but who was married and not prepared to leave his wife. She was 44 when I arrived at her house. There were a few one-night stands and weekends away ...”

“... the individual in conflict, riven in one way or another. It is no accident, so to speak, that R.D. Laing took his title The Divided Self from William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. If we take self-division and conflict for granted, as Freud and Eliot clearly do; and if we take seriously the problem, and not merely the progress, of ...”

“... Sanity and its vagaries were much discussed at this time, the fashionable theorists being R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz. Their ideas had never impinged on my father nor were they likely to; balance of mind was something you were entitled to take for granted so far as he was concerned: ‘Item No. 1 on the agenda, to get your Mam back to normal.’ Except ...”

“... experiments. The patients flitted like ghosts across the pages. To my embarrassment, I couldn’t rid myself of a mental image of animals glimpsed in the wild – the odd sightings of the patients in these official studies are like flashes of life in an alien habitat. But the metaphor seems obscene given that these patients were (or had been) pretty much ...”