“... 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 ...”

“... for Gray, a confirmed habit of mind,’ Mack says of the young Gray’s translations of Tasso and Dante. He cannot resist turning the effect of this into its cause, describing it as ‘a manner of self-expression that conveniently avoided having to direct too much attention to the self’. We are only a step away from the ‘discovery’ in the verse of all ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... description. He is impatient with muddy or uncertain aesthetic criteria. Calvino rarely alludes to Dante, but the moments when he does are significant: he compares the critic to Minos, judge of the damned, assigning hellish placements with a flick of his tail, but ‘without ever being sure which god has assigned him that ungrateful task for ever’.None of ...”

“... in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençal.He doesn’t like Soviet orchestral music:At three a.m. I was walking the floor and listening to Khachaturian working in a tractor factory. He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose ...”

“... sweet, feminine spirit of the Poveretto. Altichiero on the other hand comes from the spirit of Dante – stern, knightly, metaphysical.It often happens that a great discovery in the sphere of art history is the work of writers, not art historians … [He is thinking of Thoré-Bürger’s discovery of Vermeer.]I have tried my strength so that Altichiero ...”

“... in her shawl. This is a God’s-eye view of the history of literature: Chaucer conversing with Dante, Shakespeare with Marlowe, Herbert with Donne, Austen with Thackeray, the Brownings with each other – and now, somewhere, we might add, Bishop with Moore and Lowell. It eliminates nothing that literature confronts – ‘deaths, deaths and ...”

“... post-humous. Can you have immortality without Death? Let’s have another. I’d give the whole of Dante, Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci for one night with some beautiful woman I loved. Wouldn’t you?’ ‘Of course not,’ Hunty cried in horror. ‘Michelangelo?’ ‘If I saw you drowning in the Liffey shouldn’t I drown the whole world’s ...”

“... Seat’, Robert Frost’s marvellous little short tale in verse about the buzz saw, a sonnet of Dante admirably translated by Kenneth Koch, Adrian Mitchell’s ‘Giving Potatoes’, Theodore Roethke’s ‘The Meadow Mouse’ or a 12-line poem by James Stephens (author of The Crock of Gold) entitled ‘A Glass of Beer’, whose concluding curse on a ...”

“... its rich deposits of serious writing about suffering – from Beowulf through Njáls Saga and Dante to the York Crucifixion play. He keeps his focus on economics by leaping, as Pollard does, from Greek tragedy to the 16th century, ‘when theatre first becomes a fully commercial enterprise’. In his account early capitalism did not just provide the ...”

“... with a great many more to come. So far, Shaw is absent from a list which includes Dickens, Homer, Dante, Rousseau, Goethe, Woolf, Constant, Balzac, Mann and Tolstoy: so it is as well that he is being taken care of ...”

“... adventurousness in the world, their healthy-minded attitudes, or, as he says in commending Dante and Wordsworth, for their ‘tonic and consoling power’. Early on, in Principles, he engages in a bizarre diatribe against ‘the habit of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going ... even the habit of excessive indulgence in music’, aside from ...”