“... that he planned one further volume only, which was to be his Paradiso: a resolution modelled on Dante, and on classical epic (the Aeneid as well as the Odyssey), and incorporating Confucius, Scotus Erigena, hymns to Aphrodite, and much else besides. The much else besides turned out to include, by 1948, the defeat of the Fascist regime whose spokesman he had ...”

“... said, but Mandelstam’s was ‘a purely ethereal Rome’. It was a ‘country of the mind, only Dante’. He seems in fact to have managed a few days there. Mirsky, author of an eccentrically splendid English history of Russian literature, had gone back to Moscow a convinced Leninist and had indeed perished in the camps, though he probably met a drier ...”

“... career and to resume it – the seaboard and rustic settings and subjects, the translations from Dante and Virgil that frame it, the elegies for dead friends, the poems about driving and fishing (it is also Heaney’s most ‘sporty’ book) – it takes its note from the penultimate poem in The Haw Lantern, ‘The Disappearing Island’, and its last ...”

“... theological supporters, notably Marsilio of Padua, an intellectual imperialist in the tradition of Dante; and William of Ockham was to support the Spirituals on the issue of poverty. But they were disobedient and in certain respects heretical at a time when it was very dangerous to be so. In the previous century the successes of the Cathars and other heretics ...”

“... of the Quartets as poems depends upon these echoes, as on the great bravura passage inspired by Dante: depends upon their power of conjuring a world of significance which is suggested rather than specified. Insofar as they do specify, the Quartets are ‘not very satisfactory’: but their achievement is to marry ‘the words of the dead’ – those potent ...”

“... culture featured one of Botticelli’s illustrations to the Divine Comedy, but claimed that Dante drew it, there would be an outcry. Do publishers think that dead Arab painters don’t really matter? Fortunately, the text of The Middle East has not been written by the author of the captions. Bernard Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Near Eastern Studies at ...”

“... to have grammar at all. In his pathbreaking De vulgari eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular) Dante distinguished between the mother tongue that we learn ‘by imitating our nurses, without any rules’, and the secondary language that Greeks, Romans and others call grammatica and acquire ‘over a long period of time, through diligent study’. Even ...”

“... not only his previous reincarnation as William Blake, but also a subsequent incarnation as Dante Gabriel Rossetti. During the First World War he was offered a high-ranking political post and agents of the Ottoman Empire tried to assassinate him. He was impervious to pain and he communicated with a higher reality in trance states. His thought and his ...”

“... The Wombat​ ,’ Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote in 1869, ‘is a Joy, a Triumph, a Delight, a Madness!’ Rossetti’s house at 16 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea had a large garden, which, shortly after he was widowed, he began to stock with wild animals. He acquired, among other beasts, wallabies, kangaroos, a raccoon and a zebu ...”

“... by Flemish painting. Later he studied at Ghent and in the Antwerp Academy. Unlike William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or Edward Burne-Jones, Brown profited from a broad and thorough education in the business of painting. Later, his art became a passion and a vocation. But it never ceased to be a job from which a living had somehow to be wrung. Adult cares ...”

“... he may be called a great Irish poet, though most of the time it might seem odd to insist that Dante was a great Italian, or Shakespeare a great English, poet, partly because we vaguely think of them as transcending nationality. But Yeats was the necessary great poet of the national cultural renaissance that accompanied a struggle for political ...”

“... then looks at texts from early Christian martyrs, monks, Abelard and Héloïse, the troubadours, Dante. Next she moves on to David Hume, Goethe, Byron, Casanova, before concluding with a smattering of Netflix scripts and YouTube comments. Is this a history of love? Or a history of certain ideas about love? As the historian of China Eugenia Lean has ...”

“... came along. When Hugo indulged in table-turning, only the greatest emerged from the shadows: Dante, Napoleon, Socrates and Mozart; Hannibal spoke to him in Latin, while Shakespeare dictated a whole comedy, usefully in French. His vanity was often preposterous. In 1873 the 71-year-old genius was busy seducing his new maid, Blanche; when she touched his ...”

“... was that it would be easier to breathe the higher up he went.Lawrence didn’t say much about Dante, and I can’t imagine anyone less likely to warm to the idea of purgatory, but introducing the Divine Comedy does have two great virtues. Wilson calls Dante’s poem ‘the great epic of Schadenfreude … an act of ...”

“... past becomes his native land. Strangely frozen, it can only be challenged in the imagination, as Dante in his exile challenged his past by using Christian myth to suppress time and give his enemies hell. Joyce, too, suppressed time by making Ulysses happen in a single day – and used his fiction to settle scores. ...”