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“... after making hilarious, loving and utterly reverent films about junkie nuns and sex-crazed madonna figures, has started going off, and why Madonna with her crucifixes and her mother’s graveside is boring and embarrassing as hell. For the big irony on which all other Catholic irony turns is precisely that ...”

“... Ben Abbes becomes president. After his discussion with Tanneur, François goes to see the Black Madonna at Rocamadour, hoping for the sort of revelation experienced by Huysmans. Instead he feels ‘deserted by the Spirit’, and walks glumly back down the steps to the car park. On his return to Paris, his life gets worse. His parents die. As a ...”

“... such as ‘lacquey’ for ‘lackey,’ or oaths like ‘Name of a name!’ and ‘By the Madonna!’ Another will be free of gadzookery while cleverly preserving a formality of speech to distance it from the reader’s own times. ‘Therein, of course, you lie,’ the Corsair tells his Genoan prisoner in the Corsair story, ‘Brancaleone’s ...”

“... for the interior decoration of residences, be they patrician or princely’. And yet a Madonna and Child by Raphael or a villa by Palladio did not go out of fashion, as fine furniture or a suit of the best armour always did. The great paintings of the Renaissance were made in response to new patterns of consumption. But museums are not only ...”

“... life – and fiction; while the example of his father, his exile, the resultant early death of his Madonna-like wife (Ewa), his long decline into ruin, mourning and mysticism, all too probably left Conrad with a lifelong suspicion of all ideology, idolatry, ideologues, visionaries, idealists – and politics – though, of course, many of his protagonists tend ...”

“... a series of monumental and dramatic altarpieces, among them the ‘Assunta’ and the ‘Pesaro-Madonna’ for the Frari and the ‘St Peter Martyr’ for Zanipolo, without which the development of Baroque religious painting would be inconceivable. At the same time, he painted his celebrated mythologies for Alfonso d’Este (among them the ‘Bacchus and ...”

“... on a woman of 72 after she developed conjunctivitis. The woman had bought a statuette of the Madonna which was equipped with a reservoir of holy water. She kept a bottle topped up from the statuette and admitted that she had applied the water to her forehead on the days she was due to have surgery. Swabs taken from the bottle grew Staphylococcus viridans ...”

“... Unshakeable Iron Union of the Working Class and Peasantry! A kerchiefed woman – the Soldier’s Madonna – shielding a child from a Nazi bayonet. A rust-coloured hand clamped round a snake: We Will Eradicate the Spies and Saboteurs, the Trotskyist-Bukharinist Agents of Fascism; King noted that Sergei Igumnov’s illustration is ‘eerily reminiscent of an ...”

“... of the world’s most prominent musicians and artists. Depeche Mode just came back from Tel Aviv; Madonna is on her way. However, it seems that it is exactly these positive, ‘normal’ and likeable characteristics of Tel Aviv that make it a paradigm of the moral and political blindness of Israeli society. Tel Aviv is not only one hour away from a European ...”

“... the following clause, and the rather more secretive trust fund it alluded to: Item. I bequeath to Madonna Catarina de Santis, widow, 300 scudi in money, to be placed at interest, and the interest to be given in alms according to the instructions I have given her. If the said Madonna Catarina should die, this legacy is to be ...”

“... living in Russia. In 1917 her family lost three vast estates, two palaces, their Botticelli Madonna, everything but a handful of jewels. Her mother was lucky to get a job as cook to the canteen of the Rublevo waterworks. Ekaterina, aged 13 and passionately musical, did the piano accompaniment at the local cinema. Until that point both of them had ...”

“... the gender roles prescribed them. Eve shifts shape from dreamboat lover through to single mum, Madonna (blue-mantle variety rather than blue-velvet), whore, Jackie Collins/Shirley Conran, power-dressed overachieving brain surgeon: she samples the splendours and the miseries of a present-day courtesan, for the Eve of today still cannot find an identity ...”

“... to carry meaning. A sash passes diagonally across the drapery of the Virgin in Parmigianino’s Madonna of the Long Neck in the Uffizi. A similar band passes in the opposite direction across the breast of the Virgin in Michelangelo’s Pietà. It seems probable that Michelangelo had seen the quiver straps in antique marble statues of Diana, although these ...”

“... they had were rubbish but we still enjoyed ourselves. About the heaviest groove they had was Madonna. It was mental. It doesn’t matter, being uncool. Ibiza used to be good. Amnesia used to be a good club, but now it’s full of lager louts on E wearing psychedelic shorts. Not my cup of tea. I find the whole thing much more exciting than punk. Punks ...”

“... in the area, had been woken from his sleep on the bank of the Volga to see an apparition of the Madonna, not once, but twice. This miracle had caused him to found the nunnery, which was built up in the 17th and 18th centuries into a fine walled haven, with two large churches in the middle. The Bolshevik period had done for it. In 1928 the remaining priests ...”