Quest for truly isolated galaxies
  I describe attempts to identify and understand the most isolated galaxies
starting from my 1983 Leiden PhD thesis, continuing through a string of
graduate theses on various aspects of this topic, and concluding with an
up-to-date account of the difficulty to find really isolated objects. The
implication of some of the findings revealed on the way and presented here is
that the nearby Universe may contain many small dark-matter haloes, and that
some such haloes may possibly be accreting intergalactic gas to form dwarf
galaxies.
