“... 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 ...”

“... and set their feet on a hard road. We are meant to think, says Shahar, that when Ugolino in Dante admits ‘fasting had more force than grief,’ he means he ate his sons. But some people might have thought he had the right to. Noble fathers were dangerous people, as emerges also from Mary Wack’s Lovesickness in the Middle Ages, another work that ...”

“... the ninth and 12th centuries, which produced works of literature still read today as Shakespeare, Dante and Dickens are still read, but as a city is also one of the great monuments of Islamic art. In addition, Baghdad is the city in which, along with Cairo and Damascus, the 19th and 20th-century revival of art and literature took place. Baghdad produced at ...”

“... years. What emerged, in 1988, returned directly to Sayers for its epigraphy, to her translation of Dante; and the closely woven relations of title, epigraphs, motifs and location came brilliantly together in a brooding and far-reaching consideration of loss and darkness. In the pit-village of Burrthorpe, before the strike, a child went missing, her ...”

“... but also through Christian Gauss, the dean of the college, an excellent teacher and renowned Dante scholar. In its extremely conventional make-up as an institution Princeton somehow managed to produce and even lodge occasional independents like Wilson and, shortly after the Second World War, R.P. Blackmur, the most eccentric and brilliant American ...”

“... when they had ‘changed the story-line around a little’, to make it ‘the Divine Comedy by Dante, instead of a straight life of the BVM’. They had just ‘got it all tied up with this canonisation, God damn it, she was the BVM incarnate, she had it in the bag.’ We must leave The Recognitions and press on to Carpenter’s Gothic, pausing for a brief ...”

“... in 1977, but the subjects are ones he could have lectured on at almost any date after 1930 – Dante, the Thousand and One Nights, Buddhism, the Kabbala, Nightmares, Blindness, Poetry. These are old lectures remembered – which is to say, refined by time, in that temporal process of distortion and oblivion which Borges saw it as his task to mimic. The ...”

“... him with the Pre-Raphaelites, and when he arrived in London he ‘practically stalked’ Dante Gabriel Rossetti until the poet and painter took him on as a kind of apprentice. When Morris came to live in London later that year, he and Burne-Jones shared lodgings in Bloomsbury, paid for by Morris’s mother, and a subsequent visit from Ruskin himself ...”

“... and Frith was not alone among artists in aspiring to photographic accuracy or, as it seemed to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, literalism; he complained to William Bell Scott that most of the Academy pictures that year were ‘done in prose’. But this was what the general art-viewing public of the mid-Victorian years liked, a picture with a story they could ...”

“... like that in a decade’). Perhaps loneliness is to be developed as a theme in Volume III, and the Dante epigraph is setting us up for a dénouement in which Stalin becomes King Lear. Stalin biographers, of whom there are now many, come with all sorts of personal agendas and emotional predispositions. Henri Barbusse admired his subject, Trotsky and Isaac ...”

“... dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely. And because Dante says that no one understands anything unless he retains [it], I have jotted down what I have profited from in their conversation and composed a short study, De principatibus.Even now, at the distance of five centuries, Machiavelli’s words in The Prince ...”

“... whole secret of human life is in this dilemma – one orphan biting another, like something out of Dante. The book moves ahead by leaps and bounds, bravuras and exaggerations, and, as it admits, lies of a sort. When the infant satirist is nearly drowned at the bottom of the garden, where his tunnels were to be located, we get the following legend or ...”

“... poem chose to ‘parody’ the earlier master, just as Eliot in the Quartets makes deference to a Dante a thousand years ...”

“... is never more nearly poetic than in The Lily in the Valley, and there are constant references to Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura. Religious imagery accumulates as well, with Madame de Mortsauf compared more than once to Christ in her perfect purity and self-denying suffering. When Félix is called to Paris by the king, she writes him a long ...”