“... ugly and a subject for humour, so Eggenberger began his presentation with the image of the Madonna from Albrecht Dürer’s Dresden Altarpiece: unimpeachable, unmockable and exhibiting, he claimed, an obvious goitre. Speaking in the local Swiss-German dialect, he filled his talk with jokes and tugs on the emotions. He called iodised salt ‘whole ...”

“... that could be seen in Trafalgar Square, not even Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, Correggio’s Madonna of the Basket or Tintoretto’s St George and the Dragon, which were among the National Gallery’s most remarkable recent acquisitions. Dickens was certainly familiar with the paintings of Charles Eastlake, the keeper of the National Gallery between 1843 ...”

“... the form of San Zeno the   columns signed by their maker    the frescoes in S. Pietro and the madonna in Ortolo e ‘fa di clarità l’aer tremare’ as in the manuscript of the Capitolare Trattoria degli Apostoli (dodici) ‘Ecco il tè’ said the head waiter in 1912 explaining its mysteries to the piccolo with a teapot from another hotel but coffee ...”

“... on an off-day) and a medal stamped with the initials ‘M.L.’, which Scève interpreted as ‘Madonna Laura’. The general view is that this was more of a publicity stunt than a genuine discovery, but it fanned interest in the question of her identity, and though various families in and around Avignon hurried to claim her, the de Sades remained the chief ...”

“... to the world’? Only one place: Vuong’s second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, has a blurb by Madonna (‘beautiful writing’). It resumes Little Dog’s story, beginning in 2009: Vuong has switched to a slightly unstable third-person past tense, and Little Dog is now called Hai, but we have the same geographic and social setting, the same family ...”

“... in this context that we can think about all the talk in Tarantino’s films. The gangsters discuss Madonna in Reservoir Dogs, and have an endless discussion about whether tipping a waitress is the right thing to do.   ‘I don’t tip because society says I gotta. I tip when somebody deserves a tip.’   ‘You don’t have any idea what you’re ...”

“... del Sarto’ remains by far the best (closest) performance we have of that shading – in the Madonna of the Harpies, say, or the Borghese Holy Family, or the Louvre’s inconsolable Caritas. Sometimes, whatever Baudelaire may say, a fantasy life of the artist is the only way to bring a set of paintings back from the dead.A fantasy life, or a fantasy ...”

“... views were more traditional, ‘biblical’ she would later call them: he made her ‘feel like a Madonna’ but he would rage against her as a whore when she betrayed him. By the time Fontamara was published in 1933 (with money Valangin had helped to raise) the affair was over. From this point on Silone presented himself as a writer of the people, closer to ...”

“... in Chile. It was an important trip for the apprentice revolutionary, with Myriam, his ‘brown Madonna’, acting as guide and mentor. The pleasure of the relationship and the imminence of a life in the struggle were satisfyingly fused. (Myriam/Burgos remained in the picture, in Paris, long after the revolution had receded.) Debray was, at this time, one ...”

“... manner that appeals to everyone. Just as Amis once confessed (or boasted) that he stopped finding Madonna attractive when she went ‘hard-body’, so there are readers in good numbers who prefer something suppler in their sentences than articulated armour-plate and an almost arthropod vision of imaginative prose. Many of these disaffected readers are likely ...”

“... Jacob was imprisoned for thirteen years in the monastery of Częstochowa, famous for its Black Madonna: the icon hid, he said, the Shekhinah, the Kabbalistic divine in its feminine aspect, which, like him, had to be ‘raised from the ashes and allowed to save the world’. A nearby cave system links up to another, five hundred miles away, ‘in the shape ...”

“... celebrity to market her own image on a truly international scale. She was a self-brander – like Madonna or Lady Gaga – avant la lettre. Painters and sculptors and designers flocked to her. Canny advertisers – especially in America – clamoured to use her picture on trade cards and soap packaging. Virtually every other ‘vintage’ postcard or trade ...”

“... off her teal coat. The juxtaposition of Bobby’s tartan zip-up jacket and baseball cap with the Madonna-like incline of blonde Betty’s passionlessly beautiful face combine the ideals of wholesome American family life and the purity of the Virgin. Betty Draper and Don Draper, with their children, in season three of ‘Mad Men’. We don’t need to ...”

“... pumped-up critical-theory balloon’: ‘I really cannot read another cultural studies analysis of Madonna or The Sopranos.’He made one final attempt to intervene in British politics in 2013, with the Kilburn Manifesto, put together with his old comrades Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin. ‘The Labour Party,’ he wrote with Alan O’Shea, ‘may be busy ...”

“... like in Poland in August 1991, when John Paul II came to Jasna Gora, the monastery of the Black Madonna, in Czestochowa. He came to address a million young people, most of them from Eastern Europe, many of them in search of a new belief system to replace the one which had recently faded. We all watched entranced as Wojtyla walked up to the altar where he ...”