“... 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 ...”

“... the evidence of destruction. Relishing the palpable hostility, he proceeded to claim Dante, Goya, Breughel and Bosch as his models, before concluding with the observation that ‘You cretins are all wrong.’ That was a long time ago, but testiness remains in his repertoire. To ‘pedantic theoreticians’ scanning Bad Lieutenant (2009) for ...”

“... death; his dreadful job with seven or eight hours a day free to do nothing; his reading of Dante while travelling on the tram to and from work – or perhaps more importantly his claim to have done so; the outbreak of war and his deep opposition to the Nazi and Peronist regimes; his rejection by a woman with whom he had fallen in love; his need to ...”

“... there has been plenty of disagreement over the centuries as to the moral worth of his principles. Dante envisioned Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell, being chewed on for all eternity in two of Satan’s three mouths, either side of Judas Iscariot. Michelangelo’s bust of Brutus was probably commissioned by Donato Giannotti, a committed ...”

“... her study working on More Songs from the Glens of Antrim and a set of translations from Italian (Dante, Leopardi, Tasso, D’Annunzio). It could hardly have been less of a ‘hunt ball’ atmosphere. Keane refused to go to boarding school in England, as her siblings did, insisting on staying at home, an unwelcome intrusion into the lives of her reclusive ...”

“... paintings so as to improve it. Despite being Blake’s patron (he commissioned a series of Dante illustrations that were left unfinished on Blake’s death) he was splendidly unmoved by the mystic impulses of the Ancients. On one occasion he listened to Calvert describing one of his enchanted pictures: ‘These are God’s fields, this is God’s ...”

“... out wanting to be a poet and in the latter part of her career dedicated years to translating Dante.) By the same token, however, the high style means that there is more to date, and a high risk of becoming mannered or obsolete. What I would say is that there’s more to ‘go off’. A greater percentage of writerliness involves a higher risk of ...”

“... that would destroy the old class structures and consign to oblivion the works of Shakespeare, Dante, Petrarch, Galileo, Michelangelo and herself. Now Barney had Fascist leanings too – most of the Left Bank women did – but, no doubt thanks to superior social skills, also knew what a right-wing rich lady needed to do when the going got tough. As soon ...”

“... beneath them. His own style was fed by a curious amalgam of classical and contemporary influences: Dante and Leopardi, whom he translated; Pasternak, who ‘has meant more to us than any American poet’; Arthur Waley’s translations from the Chinese (Tu Fu in particular); Apollinaire, whose ‘Hôtel’ was one of his favourite poems. What comes out of this ...”

“... Vague, as Kaja Silverman notes, ‘virtually every line is a quotation, from sources as diverse as Dante, Proust, Chandler, Schiller, de Rougemont, Marx, Hemingway, Lacan, and Rimbaud’. But Wheeler Dixon, like many critics, remarks that the beauty of the landscape in Nouvelle Vague seems more important than the actions of the characters, for whom, as he puts ...”

“... implications. But one ought to reflect that among the poet’s preferred models are Aristotle and Dante, Pascal and Baudelaire; impersonality and intelligence, as he understood them, are the achievement of heroic personalities, and it is hard to see that they necessarily imply political wickedness. What Eliot himself says about the topic in ‘The Perfect ...”

“... of her with various celebrated female companions. Obviously, both needed to be consigned to Dante’s Inferno, to roast in the flames in perpetuity with the Unbaptised Babies, Usurers and Makers of False Oaths. I struggled to keep a poker face during these rants, but couldn’t help thinking that Dante should have ...”

“... animalism and madness’. But only shortly before the novel appeared Waugh had published a life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti that inhabited a different world altogether. The book conveys the deep romanticism of Rossetti’s best paintings with quite unfeigned reverence: Beata Beatrix, a rapt portrait of Elizabeth Siddall, is acclaimed as ‘the most purely ...”

“... other writers who in his view have also seen through human hypocrisy and insincerity: Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare. Jonathan Swift, driven mad by too much truth-telling (or so someone with Septimus’s experience of life might have supposed), doesn’t make it into the novel’s final version. But there’s a remnant, nonetheless, of his celebrated ...”