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Fire Down Below

Keith Hopkins, 10 November 1994

The Formation of Hell 
by Alan Bernstein.
UCL, 392 pp., £25, December 1993, 1 85728 225 6
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... the house in which Paul had lived in Tarsus. Since the detailed geography of heaven and hell, pace Dante, is still little known, I make few apologies for recounting what this apocryphal Paul tells us. Heaven has golden gates, with golden pillars inscribed in gold with the names and faces of the righteous few. There are angels with shining faces, and loins girt ...

Patrons

Peter Burke, 15 October 1987

Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy 
edited by F.W. Kent and Patricia Simons.
Oxford/Humanities Research Centre, 331 pp., £35, June 1987, 0 19 821978 4
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Pienza: The Creation of a Renaissance City 
by Charles Mack.
Cornell, 250 pp., $43.95, June 1987, 9780801416996
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Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice: Bellini, Titian and the Franciscans 
by Rona Goffen.
Yale, 285 pp., £30, July 1986, 0 300 03455 5
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Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance 
by Margaret King.
Princeton, 524 pp., £42.90, April 1986, 0 691 05465 7
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The Venetian Patriciate: Reality versus Myth 
by Donald Queller.
Illinois, 386 pp., $29.95, September 1986, 0 252 01144 9
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Tradesman and Traders: The World of the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c.1250-c.1650 
by Richard MacKenney.
Croom Helm, 289 pp., £35, January 1987, 0 7099 1763 5
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Florence, Rome and the Origins of the Renaissance 
by George Holmes.
Oxford, 273 pp., £25, November 1986, 0 19 822576 8
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From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in 15th and 6th-Century Europe 
by Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine.
Duckworth, 224 pp., £29.95, January 1987, 0 7156 2100 9
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Renaissance and Revolt: Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Early Modern France 
by J.H.M. Salmon.
Cambridge, 306 pp., £30, June 1987, 0 521 32769 5
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... first decade of the 14th century, the age of Duccio, Giovanni Pisano, and above all of Giotto and Dante. Holmes’s aim is not to explain this achievement (an enterprise he criticises as reductionist) but to make it more intelligible by describing its social environment. This environment includes the rise of the Franciscans in Central Italy as well as the ...

You bet your life

Margaret Walters, 21 April 1988

Oscar and Lucinda 
by Peter Carey.
Faber, 512 pp., £10.95, March 1988, 0 571 14812 3
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The Fifth Child 
by Doris Lessing.
Cape, 131 pp., £9.95, April 1988, 0 224 02553 8
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Eight Months on Ghazzah Street 
by Hilary Mantel.
Viking, 299 pp., £11.95, April 1988, 0 670 82117 9
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... friend, or Lucinda, and suddenly, with his heart-shaped face and red hair and green eyes he’s a Dante Gabriel Rossetti angel. Usually inarticulate, he has moments of blazing eloquence. At his first meeting with Lucinda, on a ship to Australia, he is swept away by a Pascalian vision: We bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it. We calculate the ...

Enlarging Insularity

Patrick McGuinness: Donald Davie, 20 January 2000

With the Grain: Essays on Thomas Hardy and Modern British Poetry 
by Donald Davie.
Carcanet, 346 pp., £14.95, October 1998, 1 85754 394 7
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... on the one hand this is the voice of an insular sensibility that preferred Langland to Dante, on the other hand this insularity, recognising Church-Latin and Brythonic Welsh as tongues of the insula along with Middle English, is more notable for what it disconcertingly invites in than what it comfortably shuts out.’ ‘Disconcertingly ...

Beltz’s Beaux

D.A.N. Jones, 3 March 1983

Marienbad 
by Sholom Aleichem, translated by Aliza Shevrin.
Weidenfeld, 222 pp., £7.95, February 1983, 0 297 78200 2
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A Coin in Nine Hands 
by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Dori Katz.
Aidan Ellis, 192 pp., £7.95, January 1983, 0 85628 123 9
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Entry into Jerusalem 
by Stanley Middleton.
Hutchinson, 172 pp., £7.50, January 1983, 0 09 150950 5
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People Who Knock on the Door 
by Patricia Highsmith.
Heinemann, 306 pp., £7.95, January 1983, 0 434 33521 5
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A Visit from the Footbinder 
by Emily Prager.
Chatto, 174 pp., £7.95, February 1983, 0 7011 2675 2
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Dusklands 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Secker, 125 pp., £6.95, January 1983, 9780436102967
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... dark shirts are taking up the width of the sidewalk with their excited movements.’ The Italy of Dante and the Vatican is also evoked, so that we may sympathise with Sir Julius Stein – a visitor from Britain, ‘his feet burning, his mind dazed by the patter of the guide so that he now confused Julius Caesar with Pope Julius II’. The characters in the ...

Domineering

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, 7 November 1985

The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett 
by Daniel Karlin.
Oxford, 281 pp., £12.95, September 1985, 0 19 811728 0
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... language were one, whose writing attained the fullness and presence of speech. To the pantheon of Dante and Shelley, Browning added Elizabeth Barrett. ‘You speak out, you,’ he announced in his second letter to her, ‘– I only make men – women speak – give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in ...

Lyrics and Ironies

Christopher Ricks, 4 December 1986

The Alluring Problem: An Essay on Irony 
by D.J. Enright.
Oxford, 178 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 0 19 212253 3
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Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric 
by Donald Davie.
Cambridge, 76 pp., £15, September 1986, 0 521 32264 2
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... see how we can assert that it is a higher and fuller form than that used by Homer or that used by Dante. Even the most capacious of the ancient genres, epic and tragedy, are vantage-points from which certain things – and only certain things – can be seen and shown; other vantage-points, those of epigram or comedy (or lyric), are living reminders that the ...

Bumper Book of Death

Frank Kermode, 1 October 1981

The Hour of Our Death 
by Philippe Ariès, translated by Helen Weaver.
Allen Lane, 651 pp., £14.95, July 1981, 0 7139 1207 3
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... imagination and in painting. Another instance is Purgatory, familiar to the theologians and Dante, but having no popular imaginative acceptance until the 16th century; prayers for the souls in Purgatory, like the Mass for the Dead, are a relatively late innovation. The notion that one needs the help of intercessors at the time of judgment also appears ...

All the Advantages

C.H. Sisson, 3 July 1980

Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E.E. Cummings 
by Richard Kennedy.
Norton, 529 pp., £12, May 1980, 0 87140 638 1
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... after taking courses which included some comparative literature and Grandgent’s course on Dante. Even then, ‘Harvard had a long tradition of emphasis on writing, especially creative writing,’ and students ‘were encouraged to write verse and fiction as well as good expository prose’. We are told – for what poet’s biography now would be ...

The Powyses

D.A.N. Jones, 7 August 1980

After My Fashion 
by John Cowper Powys.
Picador, 286 pp., £2.50, June 1980, 0 330 26049 9
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Weymouth Sands 
by John Cowper Powys.
Picador, 567 pp., £2.95, June 1980, 0 330 26050 2
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Recollections of the Powys Brothers 
edited by Belinda Humfrey.
Peter Owen, 288 pp., £9.95, May 1980, 0 7206 0547 4
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John Cowper Powys and David Jones: A Comparative Study 
by Jeremy Hooker.
Enitharmon, 54 pp., £3.75, April 1979, 0 901111 85 6
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The Hollowed-Out Elder Stalk 
by Roland Mathias.
Enitharmon, 158 pp., £4.85, May 1979, 0 901111 87 2
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John Cowper Powys and the Magical Quest 
by Morine Krissdottir.
Macdonald, 218 pp., £8.95, February 1980, 0 354 04492 3
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... and lecturing all over the States, intoxicating himself and his audience with large thoughts about Dante, Dostoevsky and Homer, while contrasting his subject-matter with his environment – years before he began forcing his physical and spiritual experiences into novels of British life. What happens in New York is that Richard takes up with an old flame, a ...

The Beast He Was

Tim Parks: ‘Kapo’, 26 May 2022

Kapo 
by Aleksandar Tišma, translated by Richard Williams.
NYRB, 306 pp., £14.99, August 2021, 978 1 68137 439 0
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... moving rapidly back and forth between real and imaginary, present and past. Just as Virgil urges Dante to keep moving when ‘ghastly wounds’ threaten to ‘intoxicate [his] eyes’ in the Inferno, so Tišma never settles for too long on the violence that wrenched these lives apart. At one point in The Use of Man (1976), Vera, an Auschwitz survivor, is ...

Hasped and Hooped and Hirpling

Terry Eagleton: Beowulf, 11 November 1999

Beowulf 
translated by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 104 pp., £14.99, October 1999, 9780571201136
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... talents, which are in any case so formidable that he needs a big-time author (Sophocles, Virgil, Dante) who will give him a run for his money. In his introduction, in a typical piece of lushly over-fanciful Heaneyspeak, he writes of the poem as having its keel ‘deeply set in the element of sensation while the mind’s lookout sways metrically and ...

Flightiness

Marina Warner: Airborne Females, 30 August 2018

Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics and Other Airborne Females 
by Serinity Young.
Oxford, 432 pp., £19.99, May 2018, 978 0 19 530788 7
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... while devils plummet down like Lucifer or, like Milton’s Satan, plane over Pandemonium. In Dante’s Inferno the serpentine Gerione, a monster with the counterfeit face of a beautiful man and a sting in his scorpion tail, carries Dante and Virgil down to hell on his back. Gustave Doré gave him the wings of a giant ...

‘I was such a lovely girl’

Barbara Newman: The Songs of the Medieval Troubadours, 25 May 2006

Lark in the Morning: The Verses of the Troubadours 
translated by Ezra Pound, W.D. Snodgrass and Robert Kehew, edited by Robert Kehew.
Chicago, 280 pp., £35, May 2005, 0 226 42933 4
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Medieval Lyric: Middle English Lyrics, Ballads and Carols 
edited by John Hirsh.
Blackwell, 220 pp., £17.99, August 2004, 1 4051 1482 7
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An Anthology of Ancient and Medieval Woman’s Song 
edited by Anne Klinck.
Palgrave, 208 pp., £19.99, May 2004, 9781403963109
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... quirky, archaising versions, Pound favoured the verse of the bellicose Bertran de Born (whom Dante condemned to hell as a fomentor of strife) and the virtuosic Arnaut Daniel (Dante’s miglior fabbro or ‘better craftsman’ – a compliment T.S. Eliot borrowed in dedicating The Waste Land to Pound). Despite moments ...

The Bloody Sixth

Joshua Brown: The Real Gangs of New York, 23 January 2003

The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld 
by Herbert Asbury.
Arrow, 366 pp., £6.99, January 2003, 0 09 943674 4
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Gangs of New York 
directed by Martin Scorsese.
December 2002
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... York’s blithe approach to the historical record, the film’s production design, supervised by Dante Ferretti, has received almost universal acclaim: the sets anchor a flawed story in a convincingly detailed physical world. The now legendary Five Points set constructed in the grounds of the Cinecittà studios in Rome is stunning. For those familiar with ...

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