“... one witness recorded, that ‘they could almost see Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son and da Vinci’s Madonna.’ But the skein of civilisation quickly unravels – one reason why so many writers are drawn to sieges, from Laurence Sterne and J.G. Farrell to Ismail Kadare and Zbigniew Herbert, whose ‘Report from a Besieged City’ captures the wretched kernel of ...”

“... of victims sometimes corresponds, in function, to Catholic iconography: the representation of the Madonna with the dead Christ is known as a Pietà because it is intended to evoke pity. That key work of compassionate representation, the Grünewald Altarpiece in Colmar, was painted for a hospital and features a Christ scored with the weals of St Elmo’s ...”

“... of invention – and it would be foolish to have expected anything less of this amazing woman, the Madonna of her day, a star in the firmament of ball-breakers. The clever, spoilt and wilful child of an illegitimate Irish beauty and a short-lived British ensign, Eliza Gilbert was shipped from India at the age of six into the care of her stepfather’s ...”

“... dieting, liposuction, breast implants and so on – while the corset itself, popularised by Madonna and beloved by the transgendered, has re-emerged as outerwear. In Bound to Please, Leigh Summers acknowledges the complexities emphasised by the revisionists, but rejects their celebratory tone. A corset-burner, she still thinks that 19th-century corsets ...”

“... chapel ‘before a small altar that was covered with jampots that had once held flowers’ with a madonna and ‘mildewing cherubs’ looking down from the damp walls. It was all very odd: the casket looked too new to have been in the earth for nine years, but the plaque on its lid was very tarnished. My grandfather wrote to Picture Post and received a reply ...”

“... front, and she regretted her decision bitterly for the rest of her life. Kollwitz was a socialist Madonna of sorts, then, and sometimes she does evoke the Holy Family in her images of impoverished households. Finally, she plays on yet another Christian subject, the Dance of Death, also a favourite of German masters, who treated it in woodcuts, even as she ...”

“... a sort of halo (it’s hard to get the brush right up to the edge), which emphasises Tree’s Madonna-like monumentality; the sedateness of her expression and clasped hands. More remarkable, if not so successful in totality, are Bell’s paintings of Lytton Strachey and David Garnett, from 1913 and 1915. The former’s glasses and beard are painted bright ...”

“... Faith No More, the Manic Street Preachers, Menswear, the Beastie Boys, the Boo Radleys and Madonna. She grew up in a council house in Wolverhampton, the eldest girl in a family of eight, then was taken on at the astonishing age of 16 by Melody Maker, the less famous but by then cooler version of NME, and then picked up by the Times, where she’s had a ...”

“... by Werther fever. There is a form of celebrity that goes with having only one name: Pelé and Madonna but also Homer and Ossian. One of the outcomes of the book’s popularity was a market for the clothes Werther likes to dress in: blue coat, yellow waistcoat and trousers. Stölzl’s film gets at this comically in having Werther borrow these clothes from ...”

“... of their talk is of otherness. This is also the reason so many students write about fanzines or Madonna in such alarmingly uncritical terms. Some of them would no more speak disparagingly of their own culture than they would insult their mothers. Just as pornography is notoriously clinical, so it is hard to write analytically about sexuality without a ...”

“... the relationship between the left knee and the left foot of Saint Catharine in the Aldobrandini Madonna of twenty years later is no less puzzling; and thirty years after that there is the awkward collision of Christ’s arm with that of the Pharisee in the late Tribute Money painted for the king of Spain. The movement and eloquence, the dynamic grace, of ...”

“... the DUP’s co-founder and leader, the Reverend Ian Paisley, referred to the Virgin Mary as ‘the Madonna of the Common Market’. The DUP has remained robustly opposed to the dangers of a ‘European super-state’, though there is no longer the same obsessive concern with the colour of the pope’s socks. Indeed, by 2016 Ulster hardliners seemed scarcely ...”

“... girl can’t help it, that’s what her position came down to.’ She’s a chimerical mixture of Madonna and (in death) Princess Diana, with other bits added on (a sting in the tail from Germaine Greer); Ormus has a dead twin brother who sings Western hits into his ear long before they burst on the rest of the world – but Ormus can never quite make out the ...”

“... Giocondo. (‘Mona’ or ‘monna’ is a form of address rather than a name: an abbreviation of madonna, literally translated as ‘my lady’ but as used in 16th-century Italy something more like ‘Mistress’ or ‘Mrs’.) To Italians the painting is and always has been La Gioconda (and to the French, La Joconde or Gioconde). This may be a reference to ...”

“... by the empty cradle of her dead baby: ‘Hush Ned, you’ll wake it!’ Better to be a reluctant madonna than the tragic heroine, dead before the last act. At the same time, compared with her mother’s life, or her own as a daughter, with its routine of housework and nursing, the early years of Georgie’s marriage were blissfully independent. The visits ...”