“... Van Vechten: ‘I shall write a poem about it – – you should hear what a tramp calls the Madonna when he’s having his abdomen cut open without anaesthetic.’ But she soon became bored, and in 1916, leaving her children in Italy with their nurse, Loy moved to New York, ostensibly to earn money and obtain an American divorce from Haweis (who had by ...”

“... Holy Grail of autonomy. One final image this chapter left: reading the description of the way the Madonna of Smolensk was paraded before the Russian army at Borodino, after it had survived the onslaughts of the French, then reading ahead to Keith Robbins’s essay on 1940 and the defence of Christian civilisation, I remembered the swelling pride of looking at ...”

“... peppered with allusions to the glorious flotsam of American life (Hägen Dazs, Hill Street Blues, Madonna, Phil Donahue, Aids), Hollywood Husbands has one foot in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart and the other in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Cruising shark-like beneath the main story, which chronicles the showbiz mores of a bewildering galaxy of cartoon ...”

“... time when the class whose anguish they unilaterally exploited was busy voting Margaret Thatcher, madonna of bother, into everlasting power. In brisk response to market forces, the movement began to publish and distribute a paper under the same Class War label. These propaganda sheets, as is the way of the world, were then collected in more durable form, as a ...”

“... all, that worshippers chiefly addressed their prayers: the Virgin of so many Annunciations, the Madonna, to whom Van Eyck gives gold tresses.The exhibition in Ghent gave you a window onto this world, indeed no glass was ever clearer, but you hardly saw the man who cleaned it. Man in a Red Turban, the panel that must be Van Eyck’s self-portrait, stayed in ...”

“... in effect, as the identifying attribute of Raphael, just as the baby Jesus is the attribute of the Madonna. Another example is provided by works showing the angel Gabriel appearing to the young Virgin, which are invariably now called an Annunciation. Rather unexpectedly, in texts before about 1800, when most pictures of this kind were still in churches, these ...”

“... out and she couldn’t get up without me. I helped her in the shower, singing bad renditions of Madonna, Michael Jackson and Wham! songs when she got flustered with drying herself and putting on face cream and brushing her teeth and pulling up her tights. (Approximate versions of 1980s pop aren’t prescribed for Alzheimer’s, but music very much is.) I ...”

“... Christ in the Resurrection is likened to a ‘grim Umbrian peasant, up before daybreak’, and the Madonna del Parto is an ancient goddess, certainly, but also as ‘rustic as any mountain girl standing in the doorway of the woodshed’. Somewhat reluctantly, Longhi admitted that there was no likelihood that Piero had studied ancient Egyptian art, and no way ...”

“... But from that beginning he gets to the heart and soul of Hawks’s movie. He rants about Madonna; after a list of her various film involvements up to Dangerous Games, he writes: ‘The burden does not lighten … then all the ads said she was Evita – no matter that she managed hardly any emotional involvement, and again seemed incapable of ...”

“... off, shows how effective this process can be. Mother and Child (Divided) is a profane yet tender Madonna, a pietà that’s a comment on abattoirs, carnivorousness, mad cow disease and other things – but the spectacle has become familiar. I can almost look at it now without looking away, though when some visitors asked me if there was a lamb in the womb of ...”

“... because there was a shortage of trained nurses. I cried in pain as a catheter was disconnected: ‘Madonna!’ Why had I sworn in Italian? For two weeks I lay in the neurosurgery ward. My head hurt like hell and my right arm had large blue-black bruises on it where the Sisters of Mercy injected painkillers. In the public ward with me were survivors of ...”

“... green and white. Graduates processed wearing their brightly coloured hoods. Some women held madonna lilies, others garlands, many wore crowns of flowers, and carried pennants and banners with resonant slogans such as ‘Give me Liberty or give me Death!’ Mrs Pankhurst’s empty carriage – she had been taken back to prison that day – followed the ...”

“... 37); an abortion Leah had; the spooky monologue of a statue, Our Lady of Willesden, ‘the Black Madonna’; and a scene at a pharmacy, when Leah is given the wrong packet of photographs, one with pictures of Shar. Hard to tell the significance of that 37: a prime number; the normal human body temperature in Celsius; the number of plays attributed to ...”

“... Juan, living in 17th-century Spain, requests protection from the ludicrously ornate statue of the Madonna, the revered Virgin of the Seven Daggers, who presides over a ‘pompous, pedantic and contorted’ church in Granada. Despite her devotee’s history of spectacular sin, the Virgin acknowledges Don Juan’s prayer and promises salvation. Reassured, he ...”

“... all’. Soon enough Lucia is seized and brought to the castle, where she makes a vow that if the Madonna saves her, she will live the rest of her life a virgin. What she can’t know is that the Nameless One is undergoing a crisis. The idea of death, which once ‘instilled in him a courageous rage, now grips him with panic’. He is overcome by ‘the ...”