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“... become a hacker, or to copy hacker slang: you will be merely a wannabe. That term is borrowed from Madonna fans; other hacker slang comes from mathematicians; and quite a lot – including the general mind-set – is shared with SF fandom: for example, IMHO, meaning ‘in my humble opinion’, and ha ha only serious, which is self-explanatory. True hacker ...”

“... are ours; Her genius and her glory are her own. Like a contemporary cultural theorist musing over Madonna, Arnold takes hold of the dead actress and refashions her as a cultural icon. In doing so, like Eliot and James but unlike Charlotte Brontë, he makes Rachel’s fame inseparable from her Jewishness. The manner of her death and burial makes it plain that ...”

“... of victims sometimes corresponds, in function, to Catholic iconography: the representation of the Madonna with the dead Christ is known as a Pietà because it is intended to evoke pity. That key work of compassionate representation, the Grünewald Altarpiece in Colmar, was painted for a hospital and features a Christ scored with the weals of St Elmo’s ...”

“... of invention – and it would be foolish to have expected anything less of this amazing woman, the Madonna of her day, a star in the firmament of ball-breakers. The clever, spoilt and wilful child of an illegitimate Irish beauty and a short-lived British ensign, Eliza Gilbert was shipped from India at the age of six into the care of her stepfather’s ...”

“... Jesus, Ian, what do Bernard and June do in their next adventure, invade Poland to rape the Black Madonna? ‘Yaaaggghhhh!’ I recall Ian screaming on the morning we first met at the UEA coffee bar, when the tea melted through his cheap plastic cup and spilled a second-degree burn on his thigh. I’d literally just walked into the place off the plane from ...”

“... to hate the young, but – like Private Eye – it actually sucks up to them. Freddie Mercury, Madonna, Heavy Metal and the like are given the expected dressing-down but with a knowing wink: we may be oldies but we’re not really out of touch, and nor are you. The Heavy Metal piece, for instance, could only be struggled through by someone who wanted to ...”

“... good sewer’, Ruskin wrote, was ‘a far nobler and a far holier thing … than the most admired Madonna ever painted’. The Pursuit of Power tells the story of this century extremely well. Evans gives clear and persuasive accounts of revolutions, political movements, constitutional developments, European and imperial wars and territorial changes. He also ...”

“... dieting, liposuction, breast implants and so on – while the corset itself, popularised by Madonna and beloved by the transgendered, has re-emerged as outerwear. In Bound to Please, Leigh Summers acknowledges the complexities emphasised by the revisionists, but rejects their celebratory tone. A corset-burner, she still thinks that 19th-century corsets ...”

“... chapel ‘before a small altar that was covered with jampots that had once held flowers’ with a madonna and ‘mildewing cherubs’ looking down from the damp walls. It was all very odd: the casket looked too new to have been in the earth for nine years, but the plaque on its lid was very tarnished. My grandfather wrote to Picture Post and received a reply ...”

“... Sebastiano’s Venetian experience, but the dead Christ lying in the foreground and the grieving Madonna seated above him both seem largely inventions of Michelangelo’s. As is often the case with Renaissance paintings, the modern title obscures rather than clarifies the actual subject. An inscription on the original frame indicates that the principal ...”

“... as befitted a wealthy noblewoman. Her most important work of this period is an altarpiece, the Madonna dell’Itria, painted around 1578 for the Convent of the Poor Clares in Paternò, the Moncada family’s ancestral home. Although unsigned, the donation records confirm that the painting was executed by Sofonisba, probably with the involvement of her ...”

“... front, and she regretted her decision bitterly for the rest of her life. Kollwitz was a socialist Madonna of sorts, then, and sometimes she does evoke the Holy Family in her images of impoverished households. Finally, she plays on yet another Christian subject, the Dance of Death, also a favourite of German masters, who treated it in woodcuts, even as she ...”

“... girl can’t help it, that’s what her position came down to.’ She’s a chimerical mixture of Madonna and (in death) Princess Diana, with other bits added on (a sting in the tail from Germaine Greer); Ormus has a dead twin brother who sings Western hits into his ear long before they burst on the rest of the world – but Ormus can never quite make out the ...”

“... by the empty cradle of her dead baby: ‘Hush Ned, you’ll wake it!’ Better to be a reluctant madonna than the tragic heroine, dead before the last act. At the same time, compared with her mother’s life, or her own as a daughter, with its routine of housework and nursing, the early years of Georgie’s marriage were blissfully independent. The visits ...”

“... by Werther fever. There is a form of celebrity that goes with having only one name: Pelé and Madonna but also Homer and Ossian. One of the outcomes of the book’s popularity was a market for the clothes Werther likes to dress in: blue coat, yellow waistcoat and trousers. Stölzl’s film gets at this comically in having Werther borrow these clothes from ...”