Certain racial aspects of her latest incarnation, such as using black female dancers as anonymous on-stage props, go beyond pop's usual magpie approach to appropriation into uncomfortable territory.
Forget the kingfisher, mute swan or hen harrier, it has to be a magpie; loud, cocky, bit of a geezer, always on the lookout for something to nick, it fills its nest with cheap, gaudy tat and predates on its smaller neighbours.
Over by the exit, another poster struck a cautionary note for any millionaire magpie who is tempted to throw open their chequebook.
No amount of magpie assemblage can compensate for this slow, synthetic creativity.
A CENTRAL character in Rossini's opera La Gazza Ladra is the titular magpie.
The success of micro is its magpie approach, stealing ideas from psychology to artificial intelligence.
By Tony Peake.Little, Brown; 624 pages; £25HE WAS many things: "A crucial figure in British cinema"; "the gay guru"; "a jewelled magpie"; "a decaying necromancer" were some of the labels attached to Derek Jarman by critics, enemies, and by himself.
Their concern is that prolonged use of the internet with its smorgasbord of tantalising titbits of information is producing a generation of magpie minds, as users hop from one bright trinket to another, rarely focussing long enough on any one topic to comprehend it thoroughly.
