“... he stripped off completely and had himself depicted unsparingly, back and front, as if by Lucian Freud. ‘No one had ever done this before,’ Rublack writes. Schwarz’s youth was already receding; he needed to work on his tone. In the last image of all, made when ‘I was 631/2 years and 25 days old,’ he appears dressed for the funeral of his long-time ...”

“... respectable; her father, Fred, was an architect and had married his boss’s eldest daughter, Anna Maria, who apparently felt the union lowered her social rank. Neither Mew nor her siblings ever married and when her father died in 1898, the family found itself in a precarious situation. Anna Maria insisted that paid ...”

“... to Milton, she writes about the autobiography of Sean O’Casey and Ernest Jones’s biography of Freud. Nor, in her political life, were Abraham Lincoln and Steffens anomalies. As early as the 1940s, she supported the Henry Wallace campaign (he would eventually become Roosevelt’s vice-president), working as an usher for at least one Progressive Party ...”

“... worse. Not that we have any choice. Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud, Mary Lamb, Alice James, Anna O., Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe and Sylvia Plath are household names. Not everyone may be able instantly to identify Henriette Cornier (who in 1825 chopped off her 19-month-old ...”

“... rather than killing it off. Readings of a myth become part of the myth, as Lévi-Strauss said of Freud on Oedipus. Why did the myth fade, why don’t we hear of Brutus and Lucretia now? The answer, Donaldson says, is ‘not moral disapproval, but neglect: the explanation lies in the modern decline in classical knowledge and classical education.’ If we had ...”

“... envy: fits of female weeping were attempts to emulate the glories of male pissing. Breuer and Freud thought that tears could be a healthy channel for flushing out repressed memories. Not much advance really on the ‘excrementitious’ explanation offered in The Anatomy of Melancholy. But why the association with grief? And how can you weep for joy? The ...”

“... which is usually also the interesting stuff, gets muffled. In the course of a conversation about Freud with Arthur Koestler, Orwell said: ‘When I lie in my bath in the morning, which is the best moment of the day, I think of tortures for my enemies.’ I sometimes do that too: being helpless in the bath is the best moment to indulge horrible fantasies of ...”

“... the other a transformed Leopold-as-Sarastro, emblematic of wisdom and love. Maria Anna, Wolfgang’s elder sister, known as Nannerl, is another puzzle. Did she harbour lifelong resentment because Wolfgang first outshone her as a prodigy and then, as an adult, lost interest in her? Or was she, as Glover suggests, basically a proud and loving ...”

“... Schumann. The tests tell nothing, he says, of Dr P.’s inner life, so he asks him to describe Anna Karenina. He finds that his patient can relate the plot and even the dialogue, but that his telling of the novel is ‘quite empty for him, and lacked sensorial, imaginal or emotional reality’. I’m not really sure what that means, with what kind of ...”

“... goes. There’s no resisting it.’ Phaedra takes poison. Rebecca hurls herself into a waterfall. Anna Karenina throws herself under a train. But heroines in novels no longer die for love. Ernaux’s heroine survives the ‘time of passion’ and goes on to master the ‘time of writing’. Ida’s play isn’t a tragedy – ‘She makes sure it ends ...”

“... other participants threatened to withdraw.The first book-length history of the WLM in Britain was Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell’s Sweet Freedom, published by Picador in 1982. I was a teenager then, a first-year student at Edinburgh University: I bought it immediately, read it over and over, and I still think it’s a great ...”

“... candyfloss has started sticking to your face. But what – most peculiar of all – to make of Freud? As a young man studying the aetiology of hysteria with Charcot in Paris in 1885, he saw Bernhardt in Victorien Sardou’s Théodora and gushed about it to his long-suffering fiancée, Martha Bernays: How that Sarah plays! After the first words of her ...”

“... She studied animals for the way they shift their weight, she studied the ideas of Jung and Freud, and she learned about comparative mythology from Joseph Campbell, who was married to one of her dancers; but none of this material was directly referred to in her work itself. She made it all up – but it was nevertheless recognisable. It was entirely ...”

“... them more than they were. We can’t get rid of Nixon, no way to forget him, because of the lore. Freud and Jung are full of lore . . . so they are very much alive as figures in the imagination. We keep on learning from them, through the lore.’ Kenneth Tynan’s life is a walk-in vault of lore. His bastard status. His dandy days at Oxford. His stammer ...”

“... the painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the writer Leonhard Frank and Bertha Pappenheim (the original Anna O). Warburg’s depressive moods and neurotic instability seemed to mirror the fracturing of bourgeois Europe. ‘He had the knack of experiencing the times in a direct and physical way,’ his younger brother Max recalled. ‘I have a prophetic ...”