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“... poll was, at 61 per cent, the same as that for Prince Charles, detested ex-spouse of the Althorp Madonna and prime scapegoat for her death. Even immediately after the Paris shunt, a mere 18 per cent thought that Britain should dump the Royals in favour of a republic. This was hardly surprising: as mother to the heir-but-one to the throne Diana could ...”

“... mid-1980s. Synthesiser groups such as Human League, stadium rock bands such as Simple Minds, even Madonna – all are convincingly shown to be inheritors of ideas about how to look and sound, and often of personnel, from the post-punk era. Even a music critic who championed the movement in its heyday, Paul Morley, was able to go from the NME to masterminding ...”

“... the title role in the film of Evita and spent years trying to land it. But the role went to Madonna because the movie needed the audience who bought her records, and if that audience really cared about singing it would never have bought them. For the feminist who takes the standard line on male exploitation of the female, the best answer to the 1930s ...”

“... Rain, on which he demanded that his name be above the title. Around the same time, they say, Madonna arrived at the office with her little dog and immediately demanded that a bowl of Perrier water be found for the animal. It’s really just a giant, gold-plated playground. Barbra’s not talking to Suzy because Suzy didn’t tell her about Zimmerman’s ...”

“... with poignant amateur incompetence. A monochrome photograph or two of works of art, a Della Robbia madonna and the Mona Lisa; these she bought in the Uffizi and the Louvre respectively when she went to Europe. Europe! For don’t you remember what Katy did next? The story-book heroine took the steamship to smoky old London, to elegant, fascinating Paris, to ...”

“... the spectacle of tremulous Home Counties campesinos huddled round the shrine of the Althorp Madonna, or Hollywood divas parading at Harvard, pre-impeachment, to grease Slick Willy’s axle. The conclusion must be that morality’s demands, particularly where they are obligations of indefinite extent assigned to nobody in particular, are a good deal ...”

“... the word used recently in pieces about Sonic Youth, the reformed Sleater-Kinney, Tom Petty and Madonna, among others. Phillips found a perfect vehicle for self-starter activism in a music that many might assume was still quintessentially pale and male and terminally insular. As if on cue, here is Solange, talking about A Seat at the Table on the eve of its ...”

“... 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 ...”