“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in a variety of genres: French fabliaux, highfalutin romances, novellini or tiny tales, as well as Dante and Ovid. The stories rebuild the relationships, scams and interconnections – literary, economic, sexual – which hold the normal world together, and range in setting from the back streets of Florence to Constantinople and beyond. Boccaccio spent his ...”

“... understanding’, not merely as a literary mode. In it Benjamin discussed Spenser, Dante and the German dramatists but argued that allegory is present in any and all artful expression: that it constitutes ‘expression – just as language is expression, just as writing is’. Whatever the truth of Benjamin’s claim that ‘Baudelaire’s ...”

“... people, not monsters. And I absolutely do not want to be known as the modern-day Virgil who leads Dante through Hell (however much I may love Shalamov) … So I have omitted, as they say, the most heartrending details of camp life. I did not lure my readers on with promises of thrills and strange sights. I would have preferred to lead them up to a ...”