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Diary

James Lasdun: With the rent-collector, 21 October 2004

... 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 ...

Darling, are you mad?

Jenny Diski: Ghost-writing for Naim Attallah, 4 November 2004

Ghosting 
by Jennie Erdal.
Canongate, 270 pp., £14.99, November 2004, 1 84195 562 0
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... 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 ...

Like a Carp on a Lawn

Graham Robb: Marie D’Agoult, 7 June 2001

The Life of Marie d'Agoult, Alias Daniel Stern 
by Phyllis Stock-Morton.
Johns Hopkins, 291 pp., £33, July 2000, 0 8018 6313 9
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Marie d’Agoult: The Rebel Countess 
by Richard Bolster.
Yale, 288 pp., £16.95, September 2000, 0 300 08246 0
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... 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 ...

Snakes and Leeches

Rosemary Hill: The Great Stink, 4 January 2018

One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli and the Great Stink of 1858 
by Rosemary Ashton.
Yale, 352 pp., £25, July 2017, 978 0 300 22726 0
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... 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 ...

Just like that

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Second-Guessing Stalin, 5 April 2018

Stalin, Vol. II: Waiting for Hitler, 1928-41 
by Stephen Kotkin.
Allen Lane, 1154 pp., £35, October 2017, 978 0 7139 9945 7
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... 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 ...

Case-endings and Calamity

Erin Maglaque: Aldine Aesthetics, 14 December 2023

Aldus Manutius: The Invention of the Publisher 
by Oren Margolis.
Reaktion, 206 pp., £18, October 2023, 978 1 78914 779 7
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... 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 ...

I’ve 71 sheets to wash

Tim Parks: Alessandro Manzoni, 5 January 2023

The Betrothed 
by Alessandro Manzoni, translated by Michael Moore.
Modern Library, 663 pp., £24, September, 978 0 679 64356 2
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... 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 ...

I’m ready for you!

Raymond N. MacKenzie: Balzac’s Places, 23 January 2025

Balzac’s Paris: The City as Human Comedy 
by Éric Hazan, translated by David Fernbach.
Verso, 20 pp., £15.99, June 2024, 978 1 83976 725 8
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The Lily in the Valley 
by Honoré de Balzac, translated by Peter Bush.
NYRB, 263 pp., £16.99, July 2024, 978 1 68137 798 8
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... 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 ...

Every Watermark and Stain

Gill Partington: Faked Editions, 20 June 2024

The Book Forger: The True Story of a Literary Crime That Fooled the World 
by Joseph Hone.
Chatto, 336 pp., £22, March, 978 1 78474 467 0
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... 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 ...

Leases of Lifelessness

Denis Donoghue, 7 October 1993

Beckett’s Dying Words 
by Christopher Ricks.
Oxford, 218 pp., £17.50, July 1993, 0 19 812358 2
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... it all, desire of oblivion runs.’ Death as desired ease is worded by quotations from Dante Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Swift, Hardy, Housman and Edward Thomas. But none of the quotations is evidence that their authors maintained a conviction in favour of oblivion; above it all, no such desire runs. The passages Ricks quotes are ...

It’s life but not as we know it

Tim Radford, 3 July 1997

... the medieval Christian universe, there wasn’t much room for alien civilisation – the cosmos of Dante and Aquinas had man at the centre, surrounded by the more perfect spheres of Heaven. The Copernican revolution changed all that. Even before it was clear that the Sun was a star like other stars, and that the galaxy was just part of a universe of ...

The Road to Sligo

Tom Paulin, 17 May 1984

Poetry and Metamorphosis 
by Charles Tomlinson.
Cambridge, 97 pp., £9.95, March 1983, 0 521 24848 5
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Translations 
by Charles Tomlinson.
Oxford, 120 pp., £7.95, October 1983, 0 19 211958 3
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Conversation with the Prince 
by Tadeusz Rozewicz, translated by Adam Czerniawski.
Anvil, 206 pp., £4.95, March 1982, 0 85646 079 6
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Passions and Impressions 
by Pablo Neruda, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden.
Farrar, Straus/Faber, 396 pp., £16.50, October 1983, 0 571 12054 7
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An Empty Room 
by Leopold Staff, translated by Adam Czerniawski.
Bloodaxe, 64 pp., £3.25, March 1983, 0 906427 52 5
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... interest in translating Classical and European poetry into Irish English. To translate Tibullus, Dante, Nerval and Apollinaire is to offer glimpses of a new landscape, a fresh cultural initiative which may in time be embodied formally and institutionally. Again, translation can be seen as an ambitious type of Neoclassicism which helps to form conscience. The ...

Chips

Nicholas Penny, 18 March 1982

Michelangelo and the Language of Art 
by David Summers.
Princeton, 626 pp., £26.50, February 1981, 0 691 03957 7
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Bernini in France: An Episode in 17th-Century History 
by Cecil Gould.
Weidenfeld, 158 pp., £12.95, March 1982, 0 297 77944 3
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... all, Ficino’s ideas are ‘themselves closely related’ to a tradition ‘starting forward from Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio’. The trouble is, of course, that we know very little about what Michelangelo read: Summers is painfully aware of this. It is also hard to be sure of what he said. Condivi’s biography is a valuable source and clearly reflects ...

Grandfather Emerson

Harold Bloom, 7 April 1994

Poetry and Pragmatism 
by Richard Poirier.
Faber, 228 pp., £20, November 1992, 0 571 16617 2
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... And yet Emerson wants more, even if he cannot quite name the desire: Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendour of meaning that plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had another use than for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads: that these things bore a second and finer ...

A Sort of Nobody

Michael Wood, 9 May 1996

Not Entitled: A Memoir 
by Frank Kermode.
HarperCollins, 263 pp., £18, May 1996, 0 00 255519 0
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... at the end of The Genesis of Secrecy (1979), ‘is our beloved codex’: We may not see it, as Dante did, in perfect order, gathered by love into one volume, but we do, living as reading, like to think of it as a place where we can travel back and forth at will, divining congruences, conjunctions, opposites; extracting secrets from its secrecy, making ...

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