Cocaine on the brain

It is certainly one of the catchier titles among next year's books: Freud on Coke.

David Cohen, who published an account of Freud's flight from Nazi-occupied Vienna, The Escape of Sigmund Freud, last year, takes a more obscure episode for his new book: the psychoanalyst's early experiments with cocaine.

On the subject of Jews and narcotics, I could hardly ignore legendary Rolling Stone guitarist Keith Richard's tribute to his cocaine supplier for many years, the late Freddie Sessler.

In his autobiography Life, published this year, Richard recalled his debt to one of the more unorthodox Holocaust survivors, a man he described as "Jewish to the max" and his "second dad".