“... At the heart of How to Be Gay is an analysis of scenes from two famous films, Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945) and Mommie Dearest (Frank Perry, 1981), which present two versions of mother-daughter conflict as well as two versions of Joan Crawford, the original (almost invisible under the layers of subsequent parody) and Faye Dunaway’s strident ...”

“... experiments with mice – or with dogs. Pepys was surrounded by virtuosi such as Wilkes, Hooke and Boyle: he picked up only a few crumbs of hard science, but it would be natural for him to seek in his own secret expressive medium some of the demystifying, deconstructive functions of the new scientific styles of thought. In his biography Ollard writes ...”