“... The seven and later eight liturgical hours of each day began with Matins at around 2 a.m. – for Dante the time of ‘resplendent lights before the dawn’ – and ended with Compline around 8 p.m. The intervals changed with the available daylight over the year, devotional time wrapped inside natural time. Monks and hermits were advised to pay careful ...”

“... that they believed necessary to make a better world.Macaulay was writing in 1824, in an essay on Dante. He wasn’t born at the time of the revolution. Grégoire, who supported the trial but opposed the execution of Louis XVI, is today most famous for his speech to the French Convention in 1794 in which he coined the term ‘vandalisme’ and appealed for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Italian humanists’ turn away from Italian. Leonardo Bruni wrote influential lives of Dante and Petrarch in Italian, and Leon Battista Alberti chose Italian, not Latin, for the first version of his innovative treatise On Painting and for his astonishing dialogues On the Family, with their vivid portraits of the hyperactive entrepreneur and his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... wrote down everything the great man said over meals, so a son kept the minutes for the dead. Dante, it seems, congratulated Victor on his poetry. Jesus Christ conceded that the French genius’s new religion would replace his own. Juliette Drouet, arguably Hugo’s first disciple, addressed her unfaithful lover in daily letters as ‘my Christ’.Bellos ...”

“... for revealing how Shakespeare ‘leads us to the same point’ as the ‘Catholic philosophy of Dante, with its stern judgment of morals’. Chesterton’s influence endured. In Knight’s 1948 book Christ and Nietzsche, he wrote that when we judge the Third Reich ‘we should remember the bronze virility’ of Arno Breker’s statues, ‘the browned bodies ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... bust of Omeros and Seven Seas appears to the narrator in a dream-vision and – a Virgil to his Dante – leads him around St Lucia to its volcanic crater, Soufrière. In the ‘lava of the Malebolge’ he’s shown the ‘traitors’ who, in elected office, saw the land as views for hotels and elevated into waiters the sons of others, while their own ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Wilde’s Salome, Shaw’s Man and Superman were bought in 1949. These were followed by Dante, The Greeks by Kitto, Spinoza by Stuart Hampshire, Barabbas by Pär Lagerkvist, all the way to Sophocles and Rousseau in 1953. A very European selection. Also on the shelf is Three to Get Married, by Bishop Sheen. I thought this was about a ménage à ...”