“... 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 ...”

“... Butler ‘did more than either of the other two to help me look at life the way I do’. He named Dante, Gibbon and Tolstoy the greatest of writers and repeatedly expressed his love for War and Peace. He also spoke with reverence of Dostoevsky, on whom he comments with real fervour. More generally, he spoke of three generations of significant novelists, the ...”

“... of that art. The paradox of the Pre-Raphaelites is that they turned for inspiration to Dante and to the daguerreotype – to influences more ancient and more modern than anything afforded by the orthodox artistic training of their time. Modern technology also suggested new shapes. Photographs, when framed or mounted, usually had curved corners, or ...”

“... bandannaed by moonlight,How few and how far between –Disordered and drained, like highlights in Dante’s death mask.Or a sequined dress from the forties – hubba-hubba –Some sequins missing, some sequins inalterably in place.I’m not sure what to make of his claim that ‘hubba-hubba’ is his favourite line in his work (‘I knew it from the second I ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The Mandelstams, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva make appearances. Rilke drops in, mocked by Karl Kraus. Dante and Wallace Stevens are silently cited. Obviously there is never a dull moment, though the sum total of those moments seems duller than they are. There is an old argument about texture and structure in poetry, and John Crowe Ransom thought that although you ...”

“... stablehand, fell with tedious predictability for two of the most notorious seducers of the age, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt; but her husband seems to have managed the matter well, and this book discerns a (qualified) sexual enlightenment in him which other biographers have overlooked. Morris was born in 1834, the child of a wealthy ...”

“... At their best they can be imaginative tours d’ horizon from Homer to Nietzsche, by way of Dante and Tolstoy, a critical genealogy of the ideas and assumptions which construct the Present. More usually, they represent a brisk exercise in joining up the geniuses. The reason these courses have not hitherto gained much ground in Britain may well be our ...”

“... depends on a biology that is eroding fast. He sees the end of the world through the words of Dante and the Sun. Perduta Gente ends with the cut-up newspaper versions of the syllables ‘dis tress’ and ‘con tam’, one overprinted imperfectly on the other. Exegi monumentum aere perennius – for Reading, a religious poet without God, monuments are a ...”

“... is reversed. When Cave writes about the Middle Ages he has nothing to say about the recognition by Dante of the burned features of Brunetto Latini or (still more majestic) Ben son, ben son Beatrice. It is true that Cave is too good a critic not to be aware of the ‘extraordinary consoling power at the end’ of The Winter’s Tale. But then the endless ...”

“... Antiquity to do so. Foster’s position can be summarised as follows: in mid-life Petrarch, like Dante, underwent some kind of spiritual crisis which led to a radical redirection of his literary energies and talents. In Petrarch’s case this crisis can be dated in the years immediately following Laura’s death (though her death was only one factor among ...”

“... in Venice, with Paolo Sarpi looking back at the Council of Trent from outside Italy, and with Dante as a literary visitor to Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. These men act as eloquent ciceroni, guiding her along the highways and byways of the territories she is visiting. Her relationship to her ciceroni raises some important questions, however. To ...”