“... generation (like Moses on Pisgah) or the life in heaven which is to be obtained after death (like Dante). One might at first think the second only was meant, but Marina, after all, was a real daughter; is now at sea, like himself, rather than already in the Promised Land; and is to live ‘in a world of time beyond me’, which can scarcely be a description ...”

“... the poetic art and ‘in the small/Rooms of stanzas’. That phrase comes from ‘Mandelstam, on Dante’, a poem in four parts, in which one poet imagines another writing poems about a third. Rhyme, you once said, only   Points it up, tags it, the blue Cabinet-making of Heaven   And Earth, the elegant joints All of them flush as given! ‘The Stopping ...”

“... with each other,’ and The Tenor replies, ‘It is always the way when we love an artist. We say Dante. We say Michelangelo. We say Elvis.’ Startled, Lucchesi says, ‘You’ve read me, too?!’ The artistic director, in full tumescence now, trots out front to announce the replacement for the Tenor. The Tenor says, ‘Why not? The fetching flight attendant ...”

“... didn’t have this trust in the other side of reason. It’s as if Lewis Carroll rather than, say, Dante were the measure of the world we have lost – the mood seems later because it is less nostalgic. The modern interest in the imagination, Stevens said, ‘is to be regarded not as a phase of humanism but as a vital self-assertion in a world in which nothing ...”

“... of astrological discourse. It is a world perhaps more recognisable to us than those of Aquinas, Dante and Kepler, despite modern reverence for their achievements and disciplines. On more than one occasion in Duke Humfrey’s Library in Oxford I have lifted my eyes from an immersion in astrological casebook and manuscripts to experience a jolt as I reenter ...”

“... on his movements (the commissioner in Volterra scanned an Italian translation of The Prophecy of Dante for clues that he sought to ‘augment popular agitation’); there were attempts to arrest and banish his servants; Guiccioli was enlisted to make an ugly scene and force Teresa to end the liaison. For a long time, Byron was defiant: ‘If they think to ...”

“... and purgatorial fire were conventional poetic images – indeed conventional metaphors for poetry (Dante called Arnaut Daniel il miglior fabbro). In some respects 16th-century poems can seem like modern advertising copy. Showers of tears and arrows, dazzling eyes, mountain roads, and imprisoned souls recur with the frequency of floating hair, crashing surf and ...”

“... you?’ Wilson was the son of a lawyer, a bit chilly, a prodigious reader steeped in Plato and Dante. He thought Fitzgerald’s remark foolish – just what you might expect from a man who had been reading novelists like Booth Tarkington and H.G. Wells. But Wilson respected Fitzgerald’s ardour; he believed that was how a young man of talent should ...”

“... and Joyce. He started wearing pigskin gloves and arranging to be caught ‘muttering snatches of Dante and Gerard Manley Hopkins to himself’, but he also worked steadily on Call It Sleep. It was impressive talent-spotting on Walton’s part, since his only publication so far was a student piece called ‘Impressions of a Plumber’. And she was supportive ...”

“... and incomprehensible, ghosts come and go in the literary myths of the West – in Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare. Some speak, some are silent; Patroclus speaks clearly enough at first only to vanish while ‘gibbering’ or ‘squeaking like an animal’. Ghosts inspire fear but also offer comfort, giving timely warnings or visiting grieving ...”

“... the grounds that the coming of Christ to save humankind would not then be universal; in contrast, Dante, writing in the early 1300s, accounted for the distribution of land and water over the globe by the entirely naturalistic theory that a protuberance in the sphere of earth-matter was drawn out by the influence of the stars. The contraction of the scope of ...”

“... Science deals in the generic and art in the specific. It would be interesting to know what Dante or Pope would have made of this claim. A long time later, this idea of alternative rationalities would bear fruit in new forms of politics, all the way from feminism to the Frankfurt School. A valid form of reason would respect the feel and heft of ...”

“... and idealistic’, while the other two are more historical, satirical and angry, ‘as if Dante had wandered in reverse’. The entire trilogy was written by hand, Cărtărescu says, over many years, from start to finish without rewrites, cuts, additions or revisions; he describes the result as ‘a crisp and genuine image … scanning and mapping my ...”

“... of two medieval legends, one based on the other, about the thorny problem of righteous pagans. Dante was not the first to wrestle with the injustice of good men (women never came up) who were sentenced to hell for the mere crime of dying before Christ. Although he declined for the sake of dramatic pathos to save Virgil, he did save several other ...”

“... between women and the vernacular which dates back as far as the early 14th century, when Dante defended the eloquence of the ‘vulgar’ tongues that children learn not through schooling but by imitating their nurses.Old English poems with female narrators, such as the elegies ‘The Wife’s Lament’ and ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’ in the Exeter ...”