“... mocked Skelton’s gifts and derided Wyatt and Surrey as ‘novices crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto and Petrarch’. But Fox’s grounds for redressing the balance look doubtful. He tells us that Marxist and feminist critics ‘have effortlessly demonstrated that the “canon” of works approved and taught in the academies has been determined by ...”

“... real and strong) was something reached in darkness by a route other than that of reason. He loved Dante but his thought (though never exactly Nietzschean) is much less close to Aquinas than it is to Schopenhauer – the first major European philosopher after Plato to turn to Indian religion. Schopenhauer had a bust of Buddha in his room and kept a poodle ...”

“... and substance it more than answered back to the great scenes from history and the classics – Dante and Virgil Crossing the Styx, Scenes from the Massacres at Chios, Dante’s Justice of Trajan, Euripides’ Medea, Byron’s Marino Faliero – that Delacroix had assembled to represent his career. In particular, Lion ...”

“... most frequently during his professorial year in America in 1932-33 was not Browning, or even Dante, but Edward Lear. Lear’s genius for names – from the Quangle Wangle to the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò – had captivated Eliot from childhood, and he had imitated Lear in his pencil-written magazine of 1899, the Fireside. The ten-year-old Eliot had made up ...”

“... who has named his eldest son Emanuel after Kant, and Listless, up from London, complaining that Dante is growing fashionable. Each has his own bats in the belfry; there is a bad smell of midnight oil in the derelict medieval structure, where practical affairs are neglected for the necromancy of ‘synthetical reasoning’. In hearty, plain-man style (which ...”

“... great creations of naming, recording and enjoying, in the worlds of Homer, Shakespeare, Milton or Dante. Kafka must find mastery in minuteness, in disappearance. Kafka’s sovereign perspective on psychoanalysis ought to have helped critics to detach from its constricting domain his own person at least. His struggle with his father was essentially never ...”

“... the Romantics’. They can see the point of Italy’s investment in another premodern writer, Dante, whose laments about the disunity of the Italian peninsula in the days of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines made him a fit dedicatee for countless Piazza Dantes during the Risorgimento. But alongside Sándor Petőfi, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Taras ...”

“... the same cosmopolitan European who hung out on the fringes of the Isherwood set in Berlin, read Dante in Italian, bought Ulysses when it first came out, stood next to James Joyce in a Parisian pissoir but was too shy to speak to him, and who even in his eighties could give my mother a hard time for not having quite reached the end of A la recherche du temps ...”

“... do nothing’ and that ‘the social and political history of Europe would be what it has been if Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Mozart, et al had never lived.’ That is a startling counterfactual to insist on quite so absolutely: you would be hard-pressed even to begin to demonstrate it. He professed to deplore Shelley for saying that poets were the ...”

“... opposition leaders Fox and Sheridan, escaping from their party’s wreck, exhibit a demeanour even Dante could not have rendered ‘more sullen and gloomy’.It may be wisest to think of caricature as a necessary recoil of society against its own coercive artifice – a partial antidote to some of the abuses of the modern state just as that state was ...”

“... the Poetic Heads Blake produced for his patron William Hayley’s Turret House in Felpham: Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare and the boys. Trophies in whose glow the Sussex poetaster could bask, quietly absorbing their power.) But how much more interesting it would be, I thought, to discover in some south coast junkshop an engraved and finished copy ...”

“... with the title: ‘From the Fat Lady of the Sonnets’. The pained dentist who thought he was Dante al dente complained bitterly. And not only complained, but cried and prayed (he was a Catholic convert) and called us chartered murderers who assassinated writers as if they were so many characters. We were the hit-and-run men of culture. The Marxian ...”

“... or still lifes. His intolerances widened to include things he might have been expected to like: Dante, Milton, Spenser, Norse sagas. Broadly speaking he shied away from abstract schemas and humourlessness, prizing pragmatism and the moral claims of expediency, as a wisdom learned in the trenches. He disliked asceticism, because it mortgaged the present, and ...”

“... in the US; he also met a woman from Poland who told him a ‘story of horrors and torments that no Dante or Poe could possibly imagine’. But his mission was to save ‘the Hebrew nation in its land’ rather than to save Jews from destruction. As he told members of Mapai in 1938, ‘if I knew that it was possible to save all the children in Germany by ...”

“... Roussel was certain that fame (also in French la gloire) would be his: ‘I was the equal of Dante and of Shakespeare, I was feeling what Victor Hugo had felt when he was 70, what Napoleon had felt in 1811 and what Tannhäuser had felt while musing on Venusberg.’ These recollections were confided to Pierre Janet, the psychiatrist who wrote up ...”