“... famous ‘Stalin Epigram’), by the ‘delectable mountains’, which the notes tell me is from Dante – as the circles are. The wheel is futility, it seems, as much as torture and automatism: a marriage of Ixion and Sisyphus. What one might term ‘political’ words are sprinkled, teasingly, almost haphazardly, over the poem: ‘power ...”

“... was described as a lovely man, ‘without the talent of saying hello’. Seamus made the case for Dante, for peaches, and for basil ice cream. Willa Muir, according to Karl, ‘was fighting a losing battle at Harvard with the homoerotic community, insulting the gays without realising they were gay’. We came round again to country matters, to re-argue the ...”

“... some paternal source. Even the great Duse, she believed, was first and foremost a ‘daughter of Dante’. Cather scorned the idea that being a woman novelist meant she was confined to dealing primarily with female characters or conventionally ‘feminine’ topics such as love and courtship. Some of her best novels (The Professor’s House, One of ...”

“... and a woman called Mrs Conway, a devout Catholic from Cork, whom James Joyce would immortalise as Dante or Mrs Riordan in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In this house, John Stanislaus would entertain the rising class of Parnellites and his musical friends.Despite his job and his rents, John Stanislaus found it hard to live within his means, and was ...”

“... been dreaming since his childhood’; the relation of Freud to his patients was that of Virgil to Dante; perhaps most arresting of all, the Interpretation of Dreams is ‘a vast poem in free verse’. But without being in two minds, for she is a fervent believer, the idiom can also be troubled. ‘But this episode too ended in fiasco’ (of Freud’s ...”

“... of ‘Little Gidding’, a self-discovery achieved through dead or foreign masters-an imitation of Dante, the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and the classic, time-honoured bleakness of Johnson’s among many other ‘Vanities of Human Wishes’: the sombre voice of Eliot’s ghost is well-authorised. In the same spirit, Eliot’s poems thoughout his career will ...”

“... is to a mock-solemn claim by Amis that ‘in two hundred years I want them to be talking about Dante, Shakespeare and Martin Amis.’ The text of the Time Out feature by Richard Rayner, one of the most impressive of all the discussions, is also a study in contrasts, containing a highly unillusioned portrait of Amis’s public personality alongside an ...”

“... like this. In Europe, the medieval dream inspired by Rome and Christendom, and still strong in Dante, of a united, peaceful empire came to an end with the debacle of the Holy Roman Empire in the Thirty Years’ War. The Treaty of Westphalia buried universal monarchy as a worthy ideal; henceforward it was a foil rather than a horizon for hopes of peace. But ...”

“... a position. Eliot’s endorsements will soon be evident enough in his essays of the early 1930s on Dante as well as in the essay on Baudelaire, where he remarks that ‘in much romantic poetry’ by Baudelaire’s contemporaries, ‘the sadness is due to the exploitation of the fact that no human relations are adequate to human desires, but also to the ...”

“... initially an outsider because he used colloquial Russian and had an Abyssinian great-grandfather; Dante was an outcast wandering Italy in penury and exile. It’s jarring, then, when McGurl characterises the success and assimilation of Roth and Cisneros as a ‘phenomenon of American culture’, originating in the 1960s university scene, and marked by a ...”

“... range of figures and topics: Thucydides, Aristotle, Lucian, Quintilian, Origen, St Augustine, Dante, Boccaccio, More, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Bayle, Voltaire, Sterne, Diderot, David, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Warburg, Proust, Kracauer, Picasso and many more, each an extraordinary display of learning. No other living historian approaches the ...”

“... sense of the gap between past glory and present misery among its educated elites. From Dante onwards, there developed a tradition of intellectuals with a strong sense of their calling to recover and transmit the high culture of classical antiquity, and imbued with the conviction that the country could be put to rights only by the impress of ...”

“... adopting the name of Ghino di Tacco, a 13th-century brigand (one of his killings is recorded by Dante in Il Purgatorio), for the columns he wrote in the Italian Socialist Party newspaper. The coups of The Passage to Europe, by contrast, are not only bloodless, but their success – just as Naudé had envisaged in such cases – depended on being ...”