“... there is so much printout that we can’t see Liz and Steve: it could be Lord Lucan and Madonna having it off behind that mountain of electronic excreta. Nowhere in these illustrations do we see a book, or a human being reading a book. The Codex would seem to be BL 2000’s dirty little secret. Presumably there will be a grimy oubliette in Euston ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to become lovers in the physical sense, he converted her into his ‘Dearest Mother’ and his ‘Madonna’. A new chapter in his life began when, in February 1875, he struck up an acquaintance, soon to become an ardent friendship, with the poet W.E. Henley, who was receiving treatment in the Old Surgical Hospital. In the summer of this year and the next he ...”

“... on Mount Scopus, Mohammad ... father of newborn twins, the mother of a dead son ... a Gothic Madonna ... erect in her straight chair welcoming us to her hilltop blue-green with olive trees in the village of Taybeh, young Doris Salah ministering to dispossessed women at the YWCA, the Beduin boy with the lamb, Sassa who talks too much, motherly ... strong ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of their own images, whether it’s Colette Modelling in the Beauty Parade, C Performing as Madonna or Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, NYC (which echoes the shot of the aristocrats in their carriage in Visconti’s The Leopard). These are faces that want to be seen. Caravaggio’s Bacchus is tacked to the wall behind a portrait of a woman staring ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”