“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... entertainers in the direction of Europe. Eliot’s notion of a coherence which somehow links Dante and Laforgue with Shakespeare and Donne is, of course, a vulgar transatlantic fiction. Derived from wishful thinking and a grab-bag of Harvard survey courses, it led him to extraordinary delusions about confections called tradition, sensibility and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at times as examples of pre-Christian misguidedness about the meaning of death, though even Dante, so quick to condemn his fellow Florentines, saved the suicide Cato from his Inferno and made of him a judge of men. The authors of the histories, speeches and essays that featured such men chose their subjects with care. It is rare to read about the ...”

“... lunar episode is at once a celestial revelation like Cicero’s ‘Dream of Scipio’ or Dante’s Paradiso and a burlesque of this tradition. As such revelations tend to, it takes a long-distance view in order to make our worldly goals look like follies, but Ariosto’s Moon is exalted only literally; it is not a heaven, but an allegorical mirror of ...”

“... them, it would just be literature, just fiction, and worthless. However, I could counter that Dante, for example, had written just fiction, that Cervantes had written fiction and that Melville had written just fiction. It was irrefutable that being human would not be the same if these three works had not existed. So why not write just fiction? Good ...”

“... had served the country well enough for centuries, a sort of distillation of the Florentine of Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch, but it wasn’t an idiom for modern times – not the sort of thing you could put in people’s mouths in a novel. And it had suddenly become very important that Italian writers produce novels.‘High literature is for the ...”