“... ass’. His letters now begin to go on about usury, and the dissociation of sensibility between Dante and the Impressionists. With the appearance of The Mechanical Bride McLuhan, at forty, was set on a course he never changed. It treats of advertising, comic strips and so on, with the intention of showing us how we are shaped by these and other modern media ...”

“... Having received a copy of Barrett Wendell’s Traditions of European Literature from Homer to Dante (1920) – a work based on Wendell’s comparative literature course at Harvard – she characteristically reports to Berenson that the first thing she did was glance at the bibliography (‘they tell so much in such books!’), and was ‘saddened’ to ...”

“... when Modernist rewritings of the classics (Ulysses, Eliot’s bits and pieces of Spenser and Dante) often served as entry points to new readers. What is Post-Modern here is Zeitlin’s sense (following Lyotard, Jameson and Baudrillard) that this literary enfilade produces a ‘bottomless hierarchy of texts … an intertextual ...”

“... and which are not particularly prized today, except by cognoscenti: the Gran Mass (1856); the Dante Symphony and Faust Symphony (1857); the Christus oratorio (1866); and very late, nearly atonal piano music, including Nuages gris (1881) and La Lugubre gondola (1882). And he is particularly expansive on – and appreciative of – thematic ...”

“... of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions: Dante’s is one of those which one can only just hope to grow up to at the end of life.’ Moreover, Eliot was sceptical about the capacity of style to preserve dead subject-matter. Discussing journalism in his essay ‘Charles Whibley’, he writes: ‘literary ...”

“... chapter of cultural history to find some very different conventions at work. To read Chaucer or Dante in the light of structuralist narrative theory is to realise that such ideas are often uncannily mirrored by texts which predate our own most basic cultural assumptions. What the critics are nowadays so busily deconstructing – the complex of attitudes ...”

“... very broadly, Paulin traces the elements of religious protest in this tradition back to Dante, and presents a brief passage from Piers Plowman in his own vigorous translation. For Paulin the high point of this tradition is Milton, who is represented mainly by lengthy extracts from Paradise Lost. Paulin seems to have encountered some doubt about ...”

“... which he was particular, and spread out before him Egon Schiele prints, or the Editions Lavrentine Dante in vellum, or a slightly foxed 18th-century Maimonides translated into Ladino and printed in Sofia, or, sometimes, a regretful letter from Paris explaining that the volume of Klimt had been sold to a collector from Virginia, whose agent had, that particular ...”

“... Latin literature. The highest standards are set not by the English poets but by Homer, Virgil and Dante. If anything deserves to be part of the school curriculum merely because of its contribution to our cultural heritage it is Latin, which until recently was a requirement for university entrance. The intellectual shallowness of the contemporary Right can be ...”

“... no doubt looking for a design of Beardsley’s, pitched on Blake’s Anteus Setting Virgil and Dante upon the Verge of Cocytus as grounds for refusal, and when Arthur Symons pointed out that Blake was considered “a very spiritual artist”, replied: “Oh, Mr Symons, you must remember that we have an audience of young ladies as well as an audience of ...”

“... point in all French school histories), and propaganda against the religion was unremitting. Dante honoured the Muslim philosophers Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina, but as a Christian poet he had to do his duty, so imagined the Prophet of Islam and his son-in-law Ali consigned to the eighth circle of Hell, one of the ditches of Malebolge:No barrel, even though ...”

“... inspired by what Byron had done in Don Juan with the ottava rima of Ariosto and Tasso). In Dante, each tercet tends to correspond to a complete sentence, or set of clauses; in The Triumph of Life there are very few end-stopped lines, let alone tercets. The sentences cascade through the stanzas and hurtle round the line endings (‘enjambment’ seems ...”

“... In the fifth circle of Dante’s Paradiso, the poet and his guide Beatrice encounter the spirit of his Florentine Crusading ancestor Cacciaguida. Together they discourse on the contrasts between Florence as it is now and as Cacciaguida knew it, in the mid-12th century. The city then was only a fifth of its present compass, Cacciaguida tells them ...”

“... structured story), I wish I had defended an approach to making art which can claim Bach, Dante and Joyce among its dupes. There is an element of arbitrariness in every artistic choice. The reason that (say) Beethoven’s Fifth is in C can never be as strong as the reason (say) water boils and freezes at particular temperatures. Formalism welcomes ...”

“... no Homer that he had not read’– and the same went for Plato, Lucretius, Virgil, Cicero and Dante, as well as the main authorities in modern and contemporary philosophy. He earned a reputation for prickliness and eccentricity, but his talents were unmistakable and in 1912, before he had even taken his degree, he was appointed to a college fellowship in ...”