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“... the relationship between the left knee and the left foot of Saint Catharine in the Aldobrandini Madonna of twenty years later is no less puzzling; and thirty years after that there is the awkward collision of Christ’s arm with that of the Pharisee in the late Tribute Money painted for the king of Spain. The movement and eloquence, the dynamic grace, of ...”

“... of their talk is of otherness. This is also the reason so many students write about fanzines or Madonna in such alarmingly uncritical terms. Some of them would no more speak disparagingly of their own culture than they would insult their mothers. Just as pornography is notoriously clinical, so it is hard to write analytically about sexuality without a ...”

“... Giocondo. (‘Mona’ or ‘monna’ is a form of address rather than a name: an abbreviation of madonna, literally translated as ‘my lady’ but as used in 16th-century Italy something more like ‘Mistress’ or ‘Mrs’.) To Italians the painting is and always has been La Gioconda (and to the French, La Joconde or Gioconde). This may be a reference to ...”

“... a sort of halo (it’s hard to get the brush right up to the edge), which emphasises Tree’s Madonna-like monumentality; the sedateness of her expression and clasped hands. More remarkable, if not so successful in totality, are Bell’s paintings of Lytton Strachey and David Garnett, from 1913 and 1915. The former’s glasses and beard are painted bright ...”

“... the DUP’s co-founder and leader, the Reverend Ian Paisley, referred to the Virgin Mary as ‘the Madonna of the Common Market’. The DUP has remained robustly opposed to the dangers of a ‘European super-state’, though there is no longer the same obsessive concern with the colour of the pope’s socks. Indeed, by 2016 Ulster hardliners seemed scarcely ...”

“... Faith No More, the Manic Street Preachers, Menswear, the Beastie Boys, the Boo Radleys and Madonna. She grew up in a council house in Wolverhampton, the eldest girl in a family of eight, then was taken on at the astonishing age of 16 by Melody Maker, the less famous but by then cooler version of NME, and then picked up by the Times, where she’s had a ...”

“... surely, not Stewart Headlam, inspired the hearty socialist vicar in Candida, with the cruel madonna of a wife ready to betray him with a poet.) If it was his university, it also became the heart of his religion: his symbol of sin and redemption, the great conspiracy of exploitation, misery and wrong which he and his comrades would build into a new ...”

“... of her ordinary life: a bed, a candle, a stool, a lectern. Porter’s is Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto, in which a heavily pregnant Virgin points to her belly while a couple of angels theatrically raise the curtain of a canopy for her. Tomlinson’s opening poem is an account of the painting in which the angel foretells not a Christian parousia ...”

“... because Lord Southsea had left, Algenib threw herself at the feet of the Madonna, in a chapel full of nuns delicately made-up.’ The picturegoer remembers how she hated ‘the gray-faced nuns’ at her convent school. ‘The only difference between this movie and life was that here the public knew it was being deceived.’ She turns ...”

“... And not just because he has become such a Post-Modern operation that, as we used to say of Madonna, even his publicity gets publicity. One of his favourite metaphors – for accumulating phone-calls, deals, anxieties – is of jets stacked in the sky above some fogbound airport (perhaps ‘Manderley International Junk Novel Airport’), a consummate ...”

“... his extravagantly reckless father. The Duke of Deception; and Doris Lessing’s story ‘The Black Madonna’, about an Italian prisoner of war in Southern Africa, making a film-set village for a military exercise: ‘They heard a voice booming through the loudspeakers: “The village that is about to be shelled is an English village, not as represented on the ...”

“... Cecilia, a successful obstetrician. But they have no children. Edwin, contemplating images of the Madonna and child, is broody. Like Colin restlessly envisioning his unknown father, Edwin wonders whether his meagre life might be transformed by a child. ‘If he and Cecilia had had children, if they had a daughter, would their lives be different? Would there ...”

“... to learn that by the 1890s Cassatt was being held up in France as ‘the painter of the Modern Madonna’. In George Lecomte’s words of 1892: ‘When Miss Cassatt represents mothers and children, her compositions have a nobility to them, conveying the highest characteristics of the HOLY FAMILY, but a Holy Family of modern times.’ Where did that idea ...”

“... care of the sick she is ‘St Emerence of Csabadul’. Cradling a stray dog, she is an ‘absurd Madonna’. Venting her rage she is Jehovah. As the novel develops, this legendary Emerence slowly proves knowable. The mythic outline softens, and from being a rigid archetype – or a series of archetypes – she relaxes into personhood. She is novelised and ...”

“... that art here took a fatal turning. Maybe inevitable, but chilling. ‘The Louvre version of the Madonna of the Rocks is so superior to the London one,’ Wölfflin wrote in 1899, ‘that it seems inconceivable that its originality could ever have been doubted.’ (This was before the archives coughed up evidence, such as it is, for why we have a second ...”