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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the spectacle of tremulous Home Counties campesinos huddled round the shrine of the Althorp Madonna, or Hollywood divas parading at Harvard, pre-impeachment, to grease Slick Willy’s axle. The conclusion must be that morality’s demands, particularly where they are obligations of indefinite extent assigned to nobody in particular, are a good deal ...”

“... the word used recently in pieces about Sonic Youth, the reformed Sleater-Kinney, Tom Petty and Madonna, among others. Phillips found a perfect vehicle for self-starter activism in a music that many might assume was still quintessentially pale and male and terminally insular. As if on cue, here is Solange, talking about A Seat at the Table on the eve of its ...”

“... cut loose from proximate causes, such as ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, ‘Gimme Shelter’, ‘Lady Madonna’. But those were explicit statements compared with later examples. In 1983, Elvis Costello’s poignant ‘Shipbuilding’ (sung by Robert Wyatt) was so sidelong a comment on the human costs and economic benefits of the Falklands War that you had to be ...”