When I interviewed Labour campaign chief Lucy Powell last week, it was telling that in among the usual stuff about Ed Miliband's beloved cost-of-living crisis, she promised that he would be a "green prime minister".
More recently, Toni Morrison's Beloved exposes the cost of slavery with searing brilliance, while Chinua Achebe dramatises the crude irruption of western missionaries and colonists into highly complex, sophisticated Igbo culture.
I do not believe in the effect of alleged aphrodisiacs like vintage Champagne and caviar, whose erotic charge if any derives only from the evaluation of the beloved suggested by their cost.
And although the island's larger towns – Ischia Porto, Forio, and Lacco Ameno – have turned into an even more rarefied imitation of nearby Capri (rooms at the Albergo della Regina Isabella, beloved by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, can cost £384 a night), its villages still evoke the languid days of Ferrante's heroines.
This leads dedicated Bulldog parents to go into debt or, regretfully, surrender their beloved pet because the cost is beyond their ability to pay.
Over the course of a dozen songs, she examines war, its human cost and her beloved England's role as aggressor and saviour, haven and purgatory.
Beloved, an Oprah Winfrey project, cost $65 million and grossed only $23 million in the U.S. Disney boss Michael Eisner felt some Roth projects "really would have been better as made-for-TV movies and not theatrical releases," a Disney executive says.
It can be nip and tuck for some, and often - right around now - those in charge of our beloved game are estimating the cost of the helicopter that may be required to scramble the trophy from one end of the country to the other on a final day of drama.
Not to Karmazin, who sold CBS to Viacom and is a cost-chopping supersalesman beloved by Wall Street, but to a rising star whom Redstone describes as his clone: his 48-year-old daughter, Shari Redstone.
He may even get his beloved family home back, at the cost of his soul.
In the Midwest, labor strife cost the Minnesota Orchestra its beloved music director, Osmo Vanska, who resigned as a lockout of musicians entered a second year.
