White Nights

Penelope Fitzgerald, 11 October 1990

In the beginning 
by Irina Ratushinskaya, translated by Alyona Kojevnikov.
Hodder, 320 pp., £14.95, March 1990, 9780340416983Show More
Goodnight 
by Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), translated and introduced by Richard Lourie.
Viking, 364 pp., £14.99, April 1990, 0 670 80165 8Show More
Comrade Princess: Memoirs of an Aristocrat in Modern Russia 
by Ekaterina Meshcherskaya.
Doubleday, 228 pp., £12.95, February 1990, 0 385 26910 2Show More
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“... 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 ...”

That which is spoken

Marina Warner, 8 November 1990

The Virago Book of Fairy-Tales 
edited by Angela Carter.
Virago, 242 pp., £12.99, October 1990, 1 85381 205 6Show More
Sisters and Strangers: A Moral Tale 
by Emma Tennant.
Grafton, 184 pp., £12.95, July 1990, 0 246 13429 1Show More
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“... 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 ...”

As if standing before Julius

Nicholas Penny, 7 April 1994

Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance 
by John Shearman.
Princeton, 281 pp., £35, October 1992, 0 691 09972 3Show More
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“... 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 ...”

On Thatcher

“... time when the class whose anguish they unilaterally exploited was busy voting Margaret Thatcher, madonna of bother, into everlasting power.Iain Sinclair, 27 February 1992The 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 ...”

Halifax hots up

Colin Burrow: Writing (and reading) charitably, 21 October 2004

Havoc, in Its Third Year 
by Ronan Bennett.
Bloomsbury, 244 pp., £16.99, September 2004, 0 7475 6249 0Show More
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“... with palm leaves, in imitation of Christ; Brigge, at the head of his liberated prisoners, leads a madonna (his wet-nurse) and child into neighbouring towns. He is at last set on and beaten to death for blasphemy, and seems for all the world to be another of Bennett’s failed revolutionaries. But he is more than that, or at least something different from ...”

Hustling off the Crockery

John Bayley: Kipling’s history of the Great War., 4 June 1998

The Irish Guards in the Great War: The First Battalion 
by Rudyard Kipling.
Spellmount, 320 pp., £24.95, January 1997, 1 873376 72 3Show More
The Irish Guards in the Great War: The Second Battalion 
by Rudyard Kipling.
Spellmount, 223 pp., £24.95, January 1998, 1 873376 83 9Show More
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“... be tossed and retossed in stale desolation’. The most memorable of these stories is ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’, which recalls a regimental diary’s observations on the layers and generations of corpses – French, English, German – encountered in grave-digging. To an amateur psychiatrist a shell-shocked casualty after the war pretends with ...”

Diary

John Lloyd: Long weekend in Yaroslavl, 20 July 1995

“... 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 ...”

Diary

Sandy Steele: Topless in Hong Kong, 2 October 1997

“... businessmen. All it involves is wearing a silly outfit, drinking heavily and impersonating Madonna on the karaoke. The only skill you need is the ability to pretend you’re in love with the man sitting next to you. My family had some difficulty believing this wasn’t a front for blatant prostitution, but the travellers I met in Thailand assured me ...”

Dan Dare at the Cosmos Ballroom

John Hartley Williams, 8 July 2004

“... are female arms flung straight above her head, enclosed by glossy foliage: a goddess of the cliff, madonna, sacred prostitute of the ravine. The Mekon blasts me from his dream: Disaster isn’t vegetable, you fool! I grip a ledge, securely lodge my boots. My hesitation turns her back into a tree. The noise of time is visible from here, bouncing off the chasm ...”

Everybody’s Joan

Marina Warner, 6 December 2012

“... Lopez, Angelina Jolie) were familiarising the public with an Olympian, virago ideal. Madonna, no giantess, is more muscular than Marilyn Monroe or Joan Crawford was. But it would be a mistake to think that fashionable ideas of beauty and appropriate appearances are sealed from realities; rather, the new acknowledgment of female physical strength ...”

It’s. Not. Real.

Chal Ravens: Britney fights back, 22 January 2026

The Woman in Me 
by Britney Spears.
Simon and Schuster, 275 pp., £9.99, July 2024, 978 1 3985 2254 1Show More
Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly 
by Jeff Weiss.
MCD, 388 pp., £15.99, July 2025, 978 0 374 60613 8Show More
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“... in 2007, she had released five albums, starred in a movie, been the face of Pepsi, snogged Madonna, filled her mantelpiece with awards and broken sales records around the world. She’d also become a tabloid fixture, labelled ‘sick’, ‘out of control’, a ‘time bomb’. The Hollywood fairy tale had turned Southern Gothic. As punishment for her ...”

Not Rocket Science

Alexander Nehamas, 22 June 2000

On Beauty and Being Just 
by Elaine Scarry.
Princeton, 134 pp., $15.95, September 1999, 0 691 04875 4Show More
Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy 
by Dave Hickey.
Art Issues, 216 pp., £15.95, September 1998, 0 9637264 5 5Show More
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“... constantly changing, even within the same medium. The symmetry manifested by Cimabue’s gigantic Madonna, or Duccio’s immense Christ-child, and the small saints who surround them, differs in kind from the symmetry expressed by Bellini’s geometrically proportioned figures. A la recherche de temps perdu closes by showing that all the divergent paths it has ...”

A Laugh a Year

Jonathan Beckman: The Smile, 18 June 2015

The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris 
by Colin Jones.
Oxford, 231 pp., £22.99, September 2014, 978 0 19 871581 8Show More
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“... It’s not immediately obvious that she smiles with love for her daughter (unlike, say, the toothy Madonna in Joos van Cleve’s Virgin and Child who glows with affection as she presses her breast to her son’s mouth). The artist gazes straight out of the picture but not in the conventional fashion: she is looking at something, and her daughter has turned to ...”

Proper Ghosts

Dinah Birch: ‘The Monk’, 16 June 2016

The Monk 
by Matthew Lewis.
Oxford, 357 pp., £8.99, January 2016, 978 0 19 870445 4Show More
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“... Ambrosio’s cell with fatal ease. Matilda’s ‘exquisite’ face mirrors the painting of the Madonna that Ambrosio formerly worshipped, so that his pious adoration of the Virgin is transformed into lust for a demon. No wonder Lewis’s contemporaries were taken aback. Anti-Catholic polemic was common in the late 18th century, but it had not previously ...”

Holy Grails, Promised Lands

D.J. Enright, 9 April 1992

Proofs and Three Parables 
by George Steiner.
Faber, 114 pp., £5.99, March 1992, 0 571 16621 0Show More
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“... is the promised land, Disneyworld for all. And there are gods, Carlo mio, in supermarket heaven. Madonna of the sequin tights. And Maradona, he of the hand of God. Has it ever struck you how those two names ... He breaks off for a moment: ‘he was repeating himself, he knew,’ but he can’t stop. Possibly this much of a muchness doesn’t matter; the ...”
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