“... Tristan with its ‘Liebestod’; the fana’ or annihilation-in-God of the Sufi poets; and Dante’s beyond-the-grave vision of Beatrice. Great artistic meditations on impossibility, so it appears, are our best consolation for the distinctly bad lot our brains have landed us with. Splendours is both swankily cultured – our FRS hobnobs with Herbert ...”

“... Shelley was ‘the one English poet of the 19th century who could even have begun to follow’ in Dante’s footsteps, which sets the level of praise remarkably high. The poem is Shelley’s version of Hell, in which all the flickering uncertainties of the world of appearance evoked in the earlier poems have become an imprisoning nightmare of ...”

“... Dante Gabriel Rossetti​ could always cheer himself up by belittling William Morris. At the top of a letter to Jane Morris in 1868, he scribbled a crest for ‘The Bard and Petty Tradesman’ in which Morris, plucking a lyre beneath a laurel tree, is back-to-back with his double, who is leaning over his shop counter ...”

“... on liceo students – made life bearable for Levi: one thinks of his beautiful account of reciting Dante to his uncomprehending companion in the most unpromising of circumstances. Memory recalled Ulysses’ reminder to his shipmates that that they were men, not beasts. (All this has a general import but is also idiosyncratic: ‘The Canto of Ulysses’ did not ...”

“... Emily Brontë, William Barnes, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Clare, Carroll, Clough, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, and Arnold, who, fittingly, is the pivotal figure. After this, though big names are not lacking, their contribution weighs less, in several cases because so much of their best work was done outside the period, and there is a ...”

“... Malamud...), and back with equal self-assurance to the monuments of the European tradition (Dante, Chaucer, Rabelais, Cervantes...). Although the range both of his current sympathies and of his remembered literary pleasures is astonishing, there is little ostentation in his manner. What most excites him, and is most contagious for his reader, is the ...”

“... rearrangement of both the role and effects of this concept.’ His exemplary readings – of Dante, Sade, Bataille and others – all have to do with the textual traversal of limits which unlooses a writing beyond all grasp of traditional notions like ‘literature’, ‘authorship’ and ‘meaning’. Writing becomes the very practice of radical ...”

“... interest of thinkers from Pound and Rougemont to Bataille, Klossowski and Lacan (not to speak of Dante and il dolce stil novo), where it is often linked with transgression. Courtly love has indeed always been associated with asceticism, continence and abstention, things wholly absent from these books, which do, however, insist on the uniqueness and ...”

“... way to defend the humanities is to practise them. From my past studies, I would like to remember Dante the pilgrim, who, after climbing the mountain of Purgatory, reaches the Earthly Paradise. There he finds two rivers: Lethe, which brings forgetting – of his past sins – and is a mercy for him, though the principle in relation to history has been rightly ...”

“... of intelligence homewards; his diagnosis of ‘disintegration of the intellect’ in poetry after Dante becomes a symptom of Eliot’s fear that Vivien had ‘nearly lost her reason for a time’. So visceral and personal is Eliot’s mind, in Crawford’s account, that as ‘he likens Donne’s metaphysical “bringing to light” of “curious aspects and ...”

“... thinkers have found themselves exiled by choice or force, including Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Lenin, Berlin, Arendt, Shklar and Machiavelli himself. Cicero was decapitated while trying to hot-foot it from Rome; according to Cassius Dio, his tongue was pulled out and jabbed with a hairpin by Mark Antony’s ...”

“... chatted prior to surgery, Simeons soothed his young patient, playing Virgil to this impressionable Dante, by dispensing consoling wisdom.’ At least half of this biography wastes the reader’s time with this sort of kapok. This raises a larger question: what is the function or purpose of such a detailed biography of a poet? Does it bring us closer or tell us ...”

“... place of the Christian Church, and his emphasis on the importance of ‘The Hero as Poet’ (with Dante as the foundational example) and ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ (culminating in the bardic example of Robert Burns), surely underpinned Pound’s deep and lasting sense of his vocation as a preacher, teacher and poet. Despite his modernism, Pound was a ...”

“... between writers who were hedgehogs, knowing one big thing, and foxes, knowing many things. Dante is a hedgehog, Shakespeare is a fox and various other figures fall easily into place: ‘Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying ...”

“... together with a rich mix of ephemera – jokes, doodles, snatches of poetry (Ovid, Horace, Dante), drafts of letters, household accounts, paint recipes, shopping-lists, bank statements and so on – which in some ways tell us more about him than those great and often inscrutable works of art and science for which he is famous. Leonardo’s manuscripts ...”