“... 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 ...”

“... on to an anecdote about Coleridge, and stutters out with short meditations on Frost; Petrarch and Dante are shoehorned into the afterword). There are sexy deaths and dull deaths, early deaths and lingering ones, uncanny predictions, like Auden’s, and deaths where poets lost their words first, like Stevie Smith after her stroke. There are disappearing acts ...”

“... as he was. Burne-Jones, escaping to London, entered into a star-struck pseudo-apprenticeship under Dante Gabriel Rossetti, for whom, he later said, he would willingly have ‘been chopped up’. The oddness and severe limits of this artistic education, which Elizabeth Prettejohn emphasises in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition of Burne-Jones’s work at ...”

“... book is littered with hopeful falsehoods. There is Lear’s bare forked animal, plenty of Milton, Dante (that proto-Catholic with his slightly confusing ideas about purgatory) and possibly Yeats (‘Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?’). Jack carries Robert Frost around in his pocket, finds ‘good old Leaves of Grass’ in a bookshop, misses Hart ...”

“... that few people had read as much and as intelligently. Marx learned Italian from reading Dante and Machiavelli, Spanish from studying Cervantes and Calderón, and Russian from reading Pushkin. He was thus one of the earliest practitioners of Goethe’s concept of world literature, an idea that has produced some of the finest critical writing of our ...”

“... and Corruption. In scholastic writings, Aristotle is called simply ‘the Philosopher’, while Dante honoured him as ‘the Master of Those Who Know’. In this context, Albert set himself the ambitious project of paraphrasing and commenting on every Aristotelian text he could find – an enterprise that occupied him from roughly 1250 to 1270 – to purge ...”

“... a hypothetical academic discipline structured around an international ‘supercanon’ of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton and Goethe. Aware of the fatuousness of treating a single discipline in isolation, Collini traces the emergence of English in the interplay between academic subjects. The gradual ebbing of classics – once synonymous with ...”

“... Apocalypse of Peter, an apocryphal text from perhaps the early second century, the damned, as in Dante, receive bespoke punishments: blasphemers hang by their tongues, adulterers by their genitals and so on. The history of this iconography, Dante notwithstanding (and Casey is a subtle and admiring analyst of the ...”

“... fund of feeling ... The content of his work ... cannot be talked about like the doctrines of Dante or the mental machinery of Blake ... It is not to be found in any book or set of books. Only in a very limited way can Mr Pound be discussed as it is necessary to discuss, say, Yeats: with reference to what is implicit and still to be said under the surface ...”

“... but everything that bears on colour in medieval Latin and Byzantine theology, for example, or in Dante, or in anyone else. We read, for instance, that: ‘What strikes the casual [sic] reader most about this passage is Dante’s self-conscious choice of the French term, alluminar (his version of enluminer), rather than the ...”

“... role’, but with a new despondency. He enlists the assistance of other artists, from Dante to James Joyce, and yearns guiltily for the ‘clumps’ and ‘clunks’ and ‘clogs’ of his most youthful verses. Not so guiltily, though, that he cannot welcome some jeering Joycean advice: ‘Keep at a tangent. When they make the circle wide, it’s ...”

“... reputation as a ‘serious’ composer primarily stands: the B minor Piano Sonata, the Faust and Dante symphonies, most of the symphonic poems. Walker attempts to describe the nature and quality of a handful of these works, but, unfortunately, matters of critical judgment remain on the margins of his book. What is more, in the few works he considers in ...”

“... believe in intellect in the sense in which Proust uses the word here, which is the sense in which Dante used it – though I distrust the term ‘intellectuals’ when it is used today to mean public figures who can be induced to sign manifestos. Proust qualifies religion with the precaution ‘as if’ – as if there were another world with such values. A ...”

“... exercise in canon-formation on the large scale, surveying as it does the Yahwist, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Blake and Wordsworth, and moving into our own century, where the light falls on Freud, Kafka and Beckett. What holds these diverse writers together is their ‘strength’, which refers less frequently now to their revisionary powers than it does ...”

“... was); it was assumed that, like a 19th-century Ottoman sultan, he had a French mother; and Dante placed him among the Noble Pagans in Limbo. His image was enshrined, like those of Robin Hood, Louis XI and Rob Roy, by Sir Walter Scott. In the 20th century, he has inspired that most typical of modern accolades, the debunking biography. Newby’s book ...”