“... 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 ...”

“... she writes of Botticelli’s Primavera, focusing on ‘the central figure, half Aphrodite, half Madonna, who indicates the procreation of spring in one significant gesture … I wished intensely to translate all this to my dance … Everything rustling, promising New Life.’ The goddess of love and the spiritual mother: she has summed herself ...”

“... time when the class whose anguish they unilaterally exploited was busy voting Margaret Thatcher, madonna of bother, into everlasting power.Iain Sinclair, 27 February 1992 The picture which Nigel Lawson draws of Thatcher herself is a remarkable testimony to the manner in which her government’s grand strategy was determined. Increasingly, ideas were ...”

“... campaigning on behalf of John Kerry or on behalf of his own ever-swelling celebrity. He attended a Madonna concert (she is a fellow dropout from the University of Michigan) and listened as she tearfully told everyone in the audience to go and see Fahrenheit 9/11. But however off-key he may be as a political figure, in the cinema he often hits the right ...”

“... to a superstitious form of Catholicism where the national news unquestioningly informs us that the Madonna stopped the bullet that would otherwise have killed John Paul II, or that the miraculous liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro has once again occurred in Naples, Garibaldi’s radical anti-clericalism is not welcome, nor is his scathing criticism of ...”

“... that syrupy but irresistibly powerful novel about Bernadette Soubirous and her visions of the Madonna at Lourdes. Werfel published it in 1941, after escaping from Nazi Europe, and in translation it became a publishing legend, with more than a million copies sold in its first two years and the US government buying 50,000 for distribution to the armed ...”

“... for two minutes when she was looking after Chris,’ the filmmaker John Waters has said, ‘and Madonna stole her career.’ Which is funny, because Harry’s appearance in Waters’s Hairspray (1988), playing a monstrous stage mother with a galleon hairdo opposite a properly lovely mother, played by Divine, was to me one of her greatest triumphs. How cool ...”

“... vanished woman who gave up ordinary life to follow a faith healer, who had an interest in the Madonna in art (although her supervisor probably steered her towards it as a thesis subject) and in the life of the Middle East. Such an intimate anonymity is the keynote of Jacobson’s strangely moving book. All that the antiquarian can find out about Celia’s ...”

“... whenever his eyes go up, whatever he is telling you is not the truth. A sort of 17th-century Madonna look.’ ROBERT FITZDALE: His lies were better than other people’s truths. Much more interesting. GORE VIDAL: There are different sorts of liars … Capote’s lies had a double purpose: one was to attract attention to himself and to distract attention ...”

“... in Rome Eliot dresses her fashionably. Even while she’s being admired by an art student as a Madonna, and compared to a draped classical statue by the narrator, her round white halo-like bonnet and soft grey dress are perfectly chic in Romantic 1830. Hughes suggests that high-minded Dorothea, finding insufficient suffering to alleviate on her new ...”

“... flying figures and cherubim, was interested in the rhetoric and monumentality of the Carracci. The Madonna of the Rosary, an altarpiece painted by Caravaggio in Naples in 1606-7, but never used there (it might have been rejected), and today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, is especially distressing for Robb. Below a huge swag of scarlet drapery ...”

“... on in local memory and is marked by a monument on the beach near an ugly, modern church where the Madonna wept tears of blood for the world in the 1990s. Augustine, for all the dark and dismal reverberations of his moral theology, can’t be exiled from the territory of literature: whatever you think of him, his Confessions inaugurate auto-fiction in ...”

“... man. He forms part of a small group of Pratese burghers kneeling in devotion at the feet of a Madonna. The motto he habitually inscribed at the front of his business ledgers – ‘Nel nome di Dio e del guadagno’ (‘In the name of God and profit’) – would make a perfect caption for the group. His own relations with the art world were not always ...”

“... then a Legros silverpoint portrait, then a Degas copy of a Donatello, then a Degas chalk copy of a Madonna and child by Francesco Francia, then the Francia oil itself, once owned by a friend of Degas’s father but now in the National Gallery. A section on Rome surrounds Degas’s landscapes with those by roughly contemporary fellow visitors, some of whose ...”

“... the weekly newspaper Pankhurst had begun publishing a few months earlier, carried her shawl-clad, Madonna-like photograph under the banner headline ‘IS SHE TO DIE?’ Asquith, no fool, had already decided she would not. He agreed to meet Pankhurst’s deputation within hours of her pavement protest. And so on 20 June, half a dozen female brushmakers and ...”