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“... out this corruption at its source? As it is, he saw early and clearly what many men saw later, Dante in, inter alia, the Donation of Constantine, Langland in Lady Meed, until too many men saw it and Europe was overturned. Grosseteste would not have approved of Wycliffe, but Wycliffe was right in claiming him as his predecessor. Southern’s ideal reader ...”

“... of preferences as irrational (rather than non-rational but fortunate)? I suppose that most of us (Dante being an outstanding exception) have a tendency to acquire a taste for what we are able to get and lose a taste for what we are not, and why shouldn’t we? I do not think Elster tells us. It is quite true that there are some instances of adaptation which ...”

“... ribald or at least risqué, as in this short poem by Todros Abulafia of Toledo, a contemporary of Dante: How terrible, how bitter was the day of your parting, my graceful girl. When I remember it, no part of my body is left unscarred. But how very beautiful were your feet when they twined and climbed my back. Carmi comments: ‘The last line is a typical ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on his temple (from which Socrates, outwardly a satyr, adopted it), was self-knowledge, and Dante began the Paradiso with a prayer to him: ‘Enter my breast and infuse me with your spirit, as you did when you tore Marsyas from the covering of his limbs.’ Plato said that the strains of the pipes, which he excluded from the Republic, indicated those ...”

“... Huxley on ‘a favourite topic: the poorness of all literature’: Homer was terribly overrated, Dante was hopelessly limited, Shakespeare was such a stupid man, Goethe was such a bore, Tolstoy was silly etc. We had disposed of nearly everybody, and Aldous was really enjoying himself – until a nasty doubt struck him: ‘What about Lope de Vega? I’ve ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of it and not to make money – and that’s the spirit in which he approached his adventures. The Dante-quoting, ‘O sole mio’-singing butcher in Tuscany affected to be an amateur too, one who made money through his art but who despised the world of – spitting out the English with sarcastic emphasis – ‘bizzzness’: ‘I have a bad bizzzness. I am ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but his wife, Elena Alexsandrovna, took odd jobs to keep the pair alive, and this devotee of Dante and Goethe ended up teaching accountancy to pig farmers as part of the collectivisation effort. Having served his time in Kazakhstan, he settled in Saransk, where he lived for a while in a disused jail and taught at the Pedagogical Institute as a one-man ...”