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.