“... 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 ...”

“... the poem, from line to entirety, more precise. Allegiances too, are more discreetly signalled: to Dante, Villon, Chapman’s Homer, among others; to the King James Bible and, in ‘The Spoils’, his last big poem before ‘Briggflatts’, to an array of Arabic, Jewish and Persian materials – Bunting served in Persia during the war and later became the ...”

“... persons rather than the works of Ford’s family circle. James’s deduction from the fact that Dante Gabriel Rossetti once received him at tea-time in what he thought was a dressing-gown is that the eminent artist had been ‘disgusting in his habits, never took baths, and was insupportably lecherous’. What’s worse, Rossetti habitually devoured ...”

“... as a reader. The intensity of that experience puts more fitful readers to shame. ‘I am reading Dante in Italian for the first time. O what force!’ The fusion of his literary and emotional experience is most baldly revealed in a sequence of diary entries for a week in February 1851 when he was courting his future wife, Fanny Lucy (‘Flu’), in the face ...”

“... Verdenal,’ Eliot’s inscription runs, ‘mort aux Dardanelles,’ followed by an epigraph from Dante’s Purgatorio: ‘Or puoi la quantitate/comprender dell’amor ch’a te mi scalda,/quando dismento nostra vanitate,/trattando l’ombre come cosa salda’ (‘Now can you understand the quantity of love that warms me towards you, so that I forget our ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the walk to the top of Monte Falterona, which had been an Etruscan burial place. From the summit, Dante said he saw the Adriatic and the Mediterranean at the same time, but we never did. When we first went, towns in the valley were small, many more people lived and worked in the country and the mezzadria remained familiar, the churches were full on ...”