“... the opposite persuasion. The Chairman who won his affection most was an ex-headmaster steeped in Dante. It is a British High Commissioner that he describes to Tracey as ‘one of the greatest men I’ve ever met in my life’. Perhaps this is just part of the unsolved conundrum, the national debate adjourned without a division, in which modes, manners and ...”

“... as legal tender. We, too, can invoke history to explain our hesitation. Seven hundred years ago, Dante wrote King Milutin of Rascia into the book that lies open on the Day of Judgment. Milutin’s sin, the imperial eagle explains to the poet in the Paradiso, was to forge Venetian ducats (‘il conio di Vinegia’). Today his remote descendant Milan ...”

“... about myself. I feel I have been dead for ten years now, and my ghost doesn’t walk. Dante has nothing to tell me about Hell that I don’t know for myself.’ Bunting’s poem was completed in a year. At least a couple of reliable commentators think the original version of the poem ran to 20,000 lines. In its final form it is about 700. Although ...”

“... a pure Latin – and, by an extension of the same skills, a pure Tuscan, based on the writings of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio – was distinctive. His training as a scholar began early. In June 1491 Angelo Poliziano, a Florentine poet and philologist, visited Venice. There he studied, among many other things, the ancient manuscript of Terence’s plays that ...”

“... passing literary judgment on The Lord of the Rings. ‘His admirers cannot resist comparing him to Dante, Malory, or Blake, with the necessary proviso that Tolkien is incomparable.’ Are they among these admirers? It’s not clear that even Tolkien’s fellow Inklings were that keen. ‘Oh God, not another fucking elf!’ the English lecturer and long-time ...”

“... crooks and suicides. Verdi with his vision blurred by birdshit stares from 73rd down at Dante at the Met where Verdi helps some to forget. But when they leave or enter there there’s no avoiding Dante’s stare, nor what’s beneath his constant gaze and stays there, while the opera plays, and pizza cartons three ...”

“... Idylls and a detailed discussion of ‘Ulysses’ and its relationship to Odyssey XI and Dante’s Inferno XXVI. From Dante comes the theme of great longing for experience on Ulysses’s part, but the rough talk at the start of the poem is quite like the Homeric Odysseus. There is much of interest in this sort of ...”

“... of poets. We pinpoint other poets in their respective places in Inferno, or Purgatorio, like Dante committing his contemporaries to the appropriate circles. And we ourselves get pinpointed. In every generation there are a few who seem secure in Paradiso: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Auden – all pins seemed to fly past them pointlessly. Just before my own ...”

“... the individual thoughts, they work together and give pleasure. The rich honey-smell, the rich hum. Dante saw the souls of the blessed feeding on the great petals of paradise. And their song was a bee-song, made of many hymns. There is a psychological type called ‘introverted intuitive’. Most of you are ‘extrovert intellect-sensation’ types. The hive ...”

“... Virgil of the Georgics and even (because of his Virgilianism and his espousal of the vernacular) Dante. Such romps through the centuries can’t be argued with, being so sweeping. For instance, ‘excessive satire’, Murray tells us (forgetting Virgil), is ‘Rome’s only distinctive contribution to literature’ – and there’s no way to respond to ...”

“... the hospital and he went upstairs to get something to read and when he came down he was carrying Dante. I thought: “Lowell’s in for the long haul.” He was great and he was mad, and he could be violent, which was bad for Caroline especially.’ He thought of the Review like a newspaper. He wanted it to reflect the world and avoid reflecting him, though ...”

“... of the structures that underpinned medieval European culture was multilingualism. Petrarch, Dante and Boccaccio all wrote in both Latin and Tuscan. In later medieval England, educated men were trilingual, fluent in French, Latin and English, and some knew more (Chaucer, for example, was proficient in Tuscan). At the Council of Constance, in 1417, the ...”

“... It is true that this view of the literary would have come as something of a surprise to Dante, Pope, Voltaire, Austen, Goethe, Stendhal and Tolstoy; but most of these authors were foreigners, and though other nations may speak of a literary science, the English prefer to define the timeless essence of the literary in terms that have been current ...”

“... in this house.”’ Or the row half a century later between Stephen’s father and his Aunt Dante on Christmas Day in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: ‘Dante shoved her chair violently aside and left the table, upsetting her napkin ring which rolled slowly along the carpet and came to rest against the foot ...”

“... to understanding. As a testament and a memoir in fragments, its relative in the past would be Dante’s Vita Nuova, with its rigour of self-examination, and in more recent times, Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, which does not flinch either at the constant companionship of pain. The author whispers to her friend Jim dying in a hospital ...”