“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... broken texture and light palette. In the 1860s some artists, including Anselm Feuerbach and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, employed imitations of 16th-century Italian frames for paintings made in a 16th-century style and with figures in 16th-century costume. Franz von Lenbach not only found genuine antique frames for his paintings but, we learn in this ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ran ‘Murder, metaphor and memory’; the Catholic Herald, ‘A lusty Beatrice leads her Dante’; the Literary Review, ‘A sensitivity . . . unusual in a man’ (or was that code for Alice Thomas Ellis having cottoned on?); the Oldie didn’t go for the sex much but spoke of Lorca and Pasolini sharing the same Mediterranean Catholic mind as ...”

“... to some kind of analysis, but in the thick of it one feels more need of a Dostoevsky or even a Dante than a study from the Department of Social Security. Judy’s apartment has been turned over to five young Mexicans, illegal itinerant carpenters. Three of them are there, the other two are in hospital. In pitch darkness – the electricity to the apartment ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... devoted herself to her salons and her writing: an Essai sur la liberté, a comparative study of Dante and Goethe, a history of the early Dutch Republic, three historical dramas, articles on politics, religion and morality, and her memoirs. This is an oddly monotonous period in both biographies, enlivened only by Marie’s wit. Her late comment on the great ...”

“... way of switching right and left, as well as more generally distorting life, made it diabolic. Dante puts narcissists in Purgatory with the counterfeiters; he depicts Rachel and Leah (who mirrored one another in Jacob’s bed) holding mirrors, while Beatrice arranges an optical experiment with three mirrors. In Paradise Lost, Eve falls in love with her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the wood, I go out to a spring, and from there to my aviary. I have a book under my cloak, either Dante or Petrarch, or one of the minor poets, such as Tibullus, Ovid, and the like. I read of their amorous passions and of their loves, recall my own, and take a little pleasure in this thought. In the evening, he put on his ‘courtly garments’ and entered ...”

“... PHS were invented by Wise.Dowden was understandably taken aback at Wise’s effrontery. So too was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, when Wise borrowed some of Shelley’s unpublished letters from him, only to copy and publish them in a pamphlet that – according to its imprint – originated in New York. Wise’s justification was that he was simply making the work of ...”

“... Paradise Lost was influenced less by native examples than by classical and Italian ones: Virgil, Dante, Tasso, Ariosto. Perhaps the most serious limitation of Kerrigan’s perspective is that for a great many early modern anglophone writers, the other parts of the archipelago ultimately mattered less than the rest of the civilised world. A list of ...”