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“... in Coral Gables, Florida is enormous. So is its pool, which you could say is more of a lake. When Madonna stayed there in the early 1990s, she apparently insisted on having the pool to herself, less for the swimming perhaps, and more because as a material goddess she could. I went to a book party at the hotel years ago (the American Booksellers Association ...”

“... bedchamber of the house in Sansepolcro where Piero’s nephew, Francesco, lived with his wife, Madonna Laudomia. It may have been a gift to mark their marriage, an important match securing an alliance with a family from the nearby town of Montevarchi. Most historians now agree that The Nativity was a private project rather than a commission, a consensus ...”

“... her malign spells. The coral branch often worn by the child Jesus in Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and Child is a survival of this pre-Christian Middle Eastern apotropaic magic. The mother in the judgment of Solomon, who steals another’s baby and claims it as her own, presented a threat whose recurrence in history has been neglected. But legends do ...”

“... my confession, in black and white: lars von trier, the true onanist of the silver screen.’ The madonna/whore was subject-matter for another self-defined avant-garde more than a century ago, in the lapsed Catholic aesthetic of Baudelaire and his fragile street whores, in Bel-Ami and his prostitutes and slack society ladies, in Toulouse-Lautrec’s ...”

“... yet subtle engagement ring offered to the world. In those glory years Prince was, alongside Madonna, the most fascinating pop star alive. A black R’n’B artist who juggled shiny white pop signifiers; a self-amused imp who had us follow his playfully dense personal mythology from work to work, never knowing what we might find next time round, in what ...”

“... very low in the ratings last Christmas, and in the same week Piers Paul Read was regretting that Madonna and not the Virgin Mary was a role model for the young, and Marina Warner saying that ‘the reality her myth describes is over.’ That, surely, is the basic reason why Stanley Spencer’s religious paintings are mostly ridiculous rather than ...”

“... paintings, Madonnas in pink rocking the baby Christ, a wonderful dark Christ, a Rembrandt, a Madonna in the style of Murillo or perhaps a genuine Murillo. The main thing is the holy well-fed Jesuits. A revolting Chinese figurine swathed in veils and a crimson caftan, a bearded little Jew, a shop, a broken wound, a statue of St Valentine. The priest is ...”

“... his miserable failures with women. But that dismal trail of frustrations, near-misses and madonna-whore splittings points fairly clearly to repressed homosexuality, which French disposes of in a single cursory sentence. The epicene sons of the Thirties were locked in Oedipal combat with their excessively virile fathers, a politically belated progeny ...”

“... at any particular sculpture. At the centre of the book is Moore’s celebrated Northampton Madonna of 1943-4, ‘solemn, silent and serene’. This group is surely more popular than Moore’s other sculpture because the sentiment is obvious and easily separable from its formal appeal. Rather than analysing the sculpture, Fuller reminds the reader of ...”

“... other letters in her name.’) His ideal woman would be ‘a reincarnation of Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna’ with ‘a dry sense of humour and spontaneity’, with whom he would like to lie in bed ‘chatting about existence’ and ‘occasionally teasing’. Most of the time she seems very far away. In The Consolations of Philosophy there’s a heartbreaking ...”

“... as manifested in The Giantess (c.1950), whose colossal central figure towers over the scene like a Madonna della Misericordia. She cradles an egg; geese fly out from beneath her pallium; her golden hair is a field of wheat. Around her feet a hunt is taking place – Uccello’s Hunt in the Forest but with a sylph instead of a stag – while the sea behind is ...”

“... the star-studded funeral of an Aids sufferer, from which she emerges feeling ‘fabulous’. Madonna loved the book and optioned the film rights. Jay McInerney praised Plunket’s gift for exploiting ‘the comic potential of a first-person narrator who doesn’t comprehend the implications of her own observations’. Despite all this, Plunket fell into ...”

“... 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 ...”