Water on the Brain

Dinah Birch: Spurious Ghosts, 30 November 2023

‘The Virgin of the Seven Daggers’ and Other Stories 
by Vernon Lee, edited by Aaron Worth.
Oxford, 352 pp., £7.99, September 2022, 978 0 19 883754 1
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... 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 ...

Living the Life

Andrew O’Hagan, 6 October 2016

Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency 
by James Andrew Miller.
Custom House, 703 pp., £20, August 2016, 978 0 06 244137 9
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... Rain, on which he demanded that his name be above the title. Around the same time, they say, Madonna arrived at the office with her little dog and immediately demanded that a bowl of Perrier water be found for the animal. It’s really just a giant, gold-plated playground. Barbra’s not talking to Suzy because Suzy didn’t tell her about Zimmerman’s ...

Saint Terence

Jonathan Bate, 23 May 1991

Ideology: An Introduction 
by Terry Eagleton.
Verso, 242 pp., £32.50, May 1991, 0 86091 319 8
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... subtext. The examples chosen to support some of the arguments are arresting: ‘I may mistake Madonna [a popular singer and lapsed Catholic, m’lud] for a minor deity, but can I be mistaken about the feelings of awe this inspires in me?’; ‘I still believe that profanity is a sin, even though my conversation is blue with it much of the time.’ And ...

Stage Emperor

James Davidson, 28 April 1994

Reflections of Nero: Culture, History and Representation 
edited by Jás Elsner and Jamie Masters.
Duckworth, 239 pp., £35, January 1994, 0 7156 2479 2
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... assumed the form of crows. It took a solemn procession, an exorcism and the intervention of the Madonna before the area was made safe and the church of Santa Maria del Popolo could be built in the same place. We get occasional snapshots of what Nero was up to in the Infernal Years from clerical handbooks. One account has him bathing in a seething pool of ...

Was Weber wrong?

Malise Ruthven, 18 August 1994

The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World 
by Gilles Kepel.
Polity, 200 pp., £39.50, December 1993, 0 7456 0999 6
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Pious Passion: The Emergence of Modern Fundamentalism in the United States and Iran 
by Martin Riesebrodt.
California, 272 pp., £30, September 1993, 0 520 07463 7
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... beams his messages to Africa and Pakistani mullahs sustain their anti-Western animus by watching Madonna on MTV, fundamentalism must sooner or later lose its teeth. The enemy of God is not Satan, but cultural and religious ...

Full of Words

Tim Parks: ‘Arturo’s Island’, 15 August 2019

Arturo’s Island 
by Elsa Morante, translated by Ann Goldstein.
Pushkin, 370 pp., £9.99, May 2019, 978 1 78227 495 7
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... from the ferry, this illiterate girl unpacks from her suitcase a dozen different images of the Madonna and places them for protection around her bed. Her air of submission to a husband who seems to have married her only in order to have someone to mistreat, reminds Arturo of his dog. In the night he is shocked by her animal cries. Quickly falling in ...

Another Tribe

Andy Beckett: PiL, Wire et al, 1 September 2005

Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978-84 
by Simon Reynolds.
Faber, 577 pp., £16.99, April 2005, 0 571 21569 6
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... mid-1980s. Synthesiser groups such as Human League, stadium rock bands such as Simple Minds, even Madonna – all are convincingly shown to be inheritors of ideas about how to look and sound, and often of personnel, from the post-punk era. Even a music critic who championed the movement in its heyday, Paul Morley, was able to go from the NME to masterminding ...

Mantegna’s Classical World

Charles Hope, 19 June 1980

The ‘Triumphs of Caesar’ by Andrea Mantegna in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Hampton Court 
by Andrew Martindale.
Harvey Miller, 342 pp., £38, October 1979, 9780905203164
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... is no record that he had been given a new commission from Francesco since he had completed the Madonna della Vittoria in 1496. From these various pieces of evidence one could argue that by 1501 Mantegna had completed only six of the Triumphs, and four years later had still not delivered them all. Martindale scarcely considers this possibility. Like earlier ...

Getting out of Djarkata

Rachel Ingalls, 6 October 1983

... of the European community repeats itself as the overgrown pool at the Dutch villa. The madonna-figure of the Malay mother, who is a prostitute out of necessity, is set against Jill, who; if not loved and appreciated, ‘could lapse into the promiscuity and bitterness of the failed Romantic’ (a gorgeous movie line). Guy, the good ...

Gaiety

Frank Kermode, 8 June 1995

Angus Wilson 
by Margaret Drabble.
Secker, 714 pp., £20, May 1995, 0 436 20038 4
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... in reasonably secure conditions, Wilson, ‘wearing flame-coloured pyjamas and carrying a madonna lily’, played Buggery in an Oxford show of the Seven Deadly Sins. In an age when it was dangerous to advertise homosexual inclinations he was flamboyantly gay, indeed it was inconceivable that he might for any reason even pretend to be otherwise. He ...

Boom and Bust

Margaret Anne Doody, 19 June 1997

A History of the Breast 
by Marilyn Yalom.
HarperCollins, 331 pp., £15.99, March 1997, 0 04 440913 3
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... survey, but the few poets writing on mastectomy and a few artists like Annie Sprinkle or Madonna, although they may contribute in important ways to women’s feelings about themselves, do not deliver what the last chapter heading promises: ‘The Liberated Breast’. Guilt, fear and a fashion-induced sense of inadequacy all infect women’s attitudes ...

About as Useful as a String Condom

Glen Newey: Bum Decade for the Royals, 23 January 2003

... poll was, at 61 per cent, the same as that for Prince Charles, detested ex-spouse of the Althorp Madonna and prime scapegoat for her death. Even immediately after the Paris shunt, a mere 18 per cent thought that Britain should dump the Royals in favour of a republic. This was hardly surprising: as mother to the heir-but-one to the throne Diana could ...

Say thank you

Clive James: Witty Words in Pretty Mouths, 23 May 2002

Fast-Talking Dames 
by Maria DiBattista.
Yale, 365 pp., £19.95, June 2001, 0 300 08815 9
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... the title role in the film of Evita and spent years trying to land it. But the role went to Madonna because the movie needed the audience who bought her records, and if that audience really cared about singing it would never have bought them. For the feminist who takes the standard line on male exploitation of the female, the best answer to the 1930s ...

The misogynists got it right

Christine Stansell: The representation of women in art, 1 July 1999

Representing Women 
by Linda Nochlin.
Thames and Hudson, 272 pp., £14.99, May 1999, 0 500 28098 3
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... darker passages’. But with her legs stuck out on the ground, she is both an updating of the Madonna of Humility and an evocation of dark contemporaneity: ‘The flesh of those pale, varicose-veined, naked, unhealthy, sometimes filthy, often scabbed and scarred female legs on the sidewalks of our own cities, precisely as Courbet, it is said, saw them on ...

Mise-en-Scène for a Parricide

Angela Carter, 3 September 1981

... with poignant amateur incompetence. A monochrome photograph or two of works of art, a Della Robbia madonna and the Mona Lisa; these she bought in the Uffizi and the Louvre respectively when she went to Europe. Europe! For don’t you remember what Katy did next? The story-book heroine took the steamship to smoky old London, to elegant, fascinating Paris, to ...