“... 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 ...”

“... As Augustine remarked, ‘the circles have been shattered by the coming of the Redeemer.’ Dante plays on an altered chronological scale: the pilgrim pursues an ultimately upward trajectory, advancing on God’s path. But a new and nagging irony has been introduced, as Brunetto Latini performs his perpetual circles on the burning sands. The problems of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for us that the time is long since past.’ These young men – Bekker, who ‘would translate Dante as he had never been translated before’; Bavink, obsessively working on a landscape painting called View of Rhenen; Hoyer, who was ‘going to work on his social duty’ – were burning with ambition, ‘doing our best to believe that we would still ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... were packed with riddling conceits; schoolchildren in Nevis trap one another in double entendres; Dante intricated fearsome and solemn symbolic enigmas, while Lewis Carroll poked gnomic fun at various targets in a rather more comic spirit. Riddling is a ‘trope of obfuscation’, Cook writes: ‘Doubly damned’. Her mission is twofold: first, to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the poet Hafiz on the radio, Karim reads Tolstoy, and Fauzia, to Jerry’s amazement, has books by Dante, Shakespeare and Plato on her shelves (‘Are these yours? Do you understand them?’). Where a character’s non-Englishness is marked through conversational phrases in Kiswahili, Gurnah sticks with commonplace roman rather than exoticising ...”

“... now is as “dumb of all light” as the 5th canto of HELL,’ Beckett says: he had been reading Dante again and finding models – plus, maybe more important, poetic authority – for the shadowy torments he’d taken to devising for his creatures. Still, his doubts seem more than usually serious. ‘I saw “it”, very clearly, for the first time,’ he ...”

“... from such poets as Rilke, Antonio Machado, the Norwegian Rolf Jacobsen, and many others, including Dante, are all ‘translated by R.B.’). Mr Bly wants respect; he has plenty of bristles and prickles; like Bronco toilet-paper, he takes no shit from anyone. He is, in fact, that familiar being, the ‘strong personality’. This kind of strength is innate and ...”

“... arts. In literature it is the other way round. We have never absorbed Goethe, Racine or Dante as others have absorbed Shakespeare. Indeed, not the least embarrassing feature of a visit to the Continent is the widespread familiarity there with an impressive range of English letters, and the expertise that the visitor is assumed to be able to display ...”

“... to be endured, detested and railed against; bytie was the place where one was, and wrote, as Dante or Goethe or Tsvetaeva. Byt was what killed Mayakovsky, and we have his suicide note as proof; in the end only Marina Tsvetaeva could kill Marina Tsvetaeva. One dislikes Tsvetaeva because, no matter in what time one tries to come at her, she has already ...”