“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”