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“... 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 ...”

“... this is betrayal de luxe. Roth’s intimate conflicts were rehearsed in a publication cofounded by Freud himself, with a motto from Aeschylus, untranslated, about the value of suffering, and in the ‘Genius, Psychopathology and Creativity’ issue. Pierpont paints a rather harrowing picture of the effects on Roth: ‘There he was, psychically naked, in his ...”

“... emendation:From Zeno to Spinoza, from the Gnostics to Leibniz, from Thomas Hobbes to Lenin and Freud, the battle-cry has been essentially the same; the object of knowledge and the methods of discovery have often been violently opposed, but that reality is knowable, and that knowledge and only knowledge liberates, and absolute knowledge liberates absolutely ...”

“... off a sidewalk. I just didn’t think that was reality. That was why I had fallen in love with Anna Karenina, where the injustices experienced by women and children were accorded meaning and value, and with War and Peace, where the whole premise of the book was that you couldn’t explain war without recourse to domesticity and interpersonal ...”

“... there should be a narrative in which the past and present alternated. ‘What did you think of Anna Karenina?’ Assange said. ‘I just thought it took too much of my life away. But then there’s this scene where the dog begins to speak, and I thought, yes, this is beginning to make sense.’ The biggest surprise for readers of his book, I ...”