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“... Esther Freud’s Hideous Kinky started its career with two disadvantages. One was the title: it suggests whimsy, from which the book is in fact bracingly free. The phrase is explained and has real validity within the story itself, but should have been kept in its place. The second was the nature of the advance publicity, which seemed to have the bossy intention of providing the clef to the roman ...”

“... is an entirely uncautionary tale of urban survival. Lisa is 16. Like the heroine of Hideous Kinky, Esther Freud’s amazing first novel, she has never had any opportunity to try existence in a world without drugs and with somewhere permanent to live. In the last three years she, her mother Marguerite, and her fiendish little brother Max have moved 11 ...”

“... The first time​ I saw Lucian Freud’s prints I was repulsed, for reasons I could not have explained. Freud’s paintings of female flesh can be difficult to look at, but these were monochrome portrait heads, etched in hard black line. Did I find them cruel? I’m not sure. I certainly thought they were ugly ...”

“... for silence. The Daunt writers describe giving themselves over to something, a kind of sacrifice (Esther Freud: ‘I arrived, fragile and fearful’). In the cold, the heart and lungs slow down, blood vessels contract, and the mind grows pleasurably dull. Unlike the other two swimming ponds, the Ladies’ Pond is completely secluded – a true enclosure ...”

“... reductionism, always certain he knows his subject’s inner motives and can explain them by way of Freud 101. Instead, Damrosch adopts more generous criteria for evidence worth admitting or at least entertaining, and proposes what he himself describes as ‘a far more complex, enigmatic and challenging Swift than the conventional character presented in ...”

“... they became conscious when they were young. Ronald Fraser’s book arranges a marriage between Freud and Marx. One law for the rich and another for the poor, as the two systems can be made to seem, are laid down together in a book which commemorates a desertion of the rich for the poor. He had hit on the ‘aim of combining two different modes of enquiry ...”

“... men who turn up in a boat, and are always demanding more to eat and drink and smoke – Marx, Freud and Darwin (again – he is, as we shall see, the real guru in the woodpile). As Jenny the orang-utan says to these rather bewildered guests of our heroine’s imagination, ‘She believes herself to be doomed. Psychologically. Politically. And ...”

“... the Victorians more economically, using the alien and anachronistic insights afforded by Freud, Bakhtin and Foucault. The huge accretion of contemporary materials which the Index has put in order for us remains, one suspects, largely undisturbed. It is certainly not the gateway through which every scholar enters the subject – which is what Houghton ...”

“... Savile Club. During the war he acquired a Raffles-style flat in the Albany. Although he dabbled in Freud and Nietzsche during the 1920s, he was suspicious of highbrows: he had more connections in the West End than in universities or journalism and little feeling for most writing done after about 1918. Eliot, Huxley, Lawrence and Joyce were too ‘painfully ...”

“... he held on to a substantial number of them until his death in 1968. It was to his secretary Esther Hoffe, with whom he appears to have had an amorous relationship, that Brod bequeathed the manuscripts, and she kept most of them until her own death in 2007 at the age of 101. For the most part Esther did as Max ...”

“... at every turn, perhaps even after they had been many years in service. Of course young wives, or Esther Summer-son-style dependent relatives, were equally ignorant when they first took up their duties of household management. But they at least had a copy of the book; they read it; and they were the normal conduit by which the knowledge in it reached their ...”

“... methods achieved positive results with schizophrenics – considered untreatable by Freud – and in a hospital in Maryland he created a ward for them where active fellowship was cultivated between patients and staff. His attentiveness to social context opened him to the psychological impact of forces such as institutionalised racism (he ...”

“... reality, once it becomes unreal, provides for all sorts of illusions. ‘Intense wish fantasy’, Freud would call it, even as he failed to recognise as such his own belief that he could continue to live in Vienna after the Anschluss, even as the Nazis draped a swastika over the entrance of his office and home.As Roy Redgrave recalled it, that ‘last ...”

“... Jar. Could the bright, reassuring, can-do ‘Sivvy’ who wrote to her ‘Dearest Mum’, also be Esther Greenwood, for whom vodka ‘went straight down into my stomach like a sword-swallower’s sword and made me feel powerful and god-like’?After Anne Stevenson’s, Janet Malcolm’s and Jacqueline Rose’s battles to get the archives opened, and the ...”

“... in their titles: Oborne’s; Jeffrey Masson’s polemic against the slipperiness of Sigmund Freud, which after more than thirty years retains its power to enrage Freudians; a book by the fact-checkers of the Washington Post listing the lies of Donald Trump (the only instance I can think of in which that shy fraternity has ventured into ...”