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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Death of the Heart (1938), is to be stored for a year with her brother Thomas Quayne and his wife, Anna, in their desirable residence at 2 Windsor Terrace, Regent’s Park, in the expectation either that they might grow to like her, or that she’ll somehow acquire a husband (she’s sixteen). If all else fails, Portia will ‘go on’ at the end of the year ...”

“... They were well connected in cultural circles: his mother’s acquaintances included the actress Anna Karina and Raymond Queneau, who became Patrick’s maths tutor and later introduced him to Gaston Gallimard, his publisher. Neither Alberto nor Louisa appears to have had any interest in parenting, a task they farmed out to an eccentric group of women in the ...”

“... where publishers’ failed inspirations can crawl to die. Greenwich was stuffed with copies of Anna Pasternak’s Princess in Love. Dealers in the semi-authentic antiquarian bookshops groaned as hustlers with bulging golf carts and child buggies lurched in off the street. ‘We’ve got books. Got ‘em all. Cellar’s full. Sorry.’ Book graveyards are ...”

“... a little to the language and history of psychoanalysis, which began with the case of hysteria of Anna O., the patient whose arm froze into the petrified shape of a snake as she sat with it wrapped around the back of her dying father’s chair; while terms like ‘splitting’, ‘scotomisation’ and ‘derealisation’ (mental self-blinding) slowly crept ...”

“... to Philip Rieff, the sociologist she met as a student at 17 and with whom she later co-authored Freud: The Mind of the Moralist – and Sontag took over McCarthy’s old lemonade stand as Partisan Review’s theatre reviewer. Lines of succession make for neat narratives and it’s fun to fantasise a Margo Channing-Eve Harrington face-off, but Susan Sontag ...”