“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... glory would one day outshine that of Victor Hugo or Napoleon, that he felt himself the equal of Dante and Shakespeare. His final testament more modestly hopes that, ‘faute de mieux’, his books may one day gain some measure of posthumous recognition. It was while composing La Doublure, which he always believed to be his ultimate masterpiece, that Roussel ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by the licentiousness of her subject-matter, put her books to the torch in 380 AD.) Neither Dante nor Chaucer refers to her. Only with the recovery and translation of certain ancient texts in the Renaissance – Longinus’ On the Sublime, for example, in which the famous and much-admired Fragment 31 (‘He seems to me equal to the gods’) appears as a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... physical world and of human identity. She has learned from both classic and modern masters from Dante to Bishop, and her linguistic resource, especially in description, is astonishing. In the long sequences, she risks everything, and perhaps cannot always keep the several parts from flying apart – but the wildness of the risk is itself exhilarating to ...”

“... between victims and perpetrators of violence, and to deal with them accordingly. Amis isn’t Dante. There are no heroic, reasonably virtuous political dissidents among the denizens of his Arctic inferno. Instead, there is an endless round of indiscriminate tortures, indiscriminately administered: those justly and Islamofascistically severed hands, those ...”