“... its chosen and eventual target.’ As a Florentine, she leans a bit too much on ‘her co-citizen, Dante... surely, at such a moment, with psychic defences weak, Fate might be tempted to strike?’ Attracted to the priest, she feels leery of the passion which is his territory: in an old-fashioned way she desires to be swept off her feet and finds the pleading ...”

“... and significant whole, nor the work of a poet who repays as much close study as Sophocles, Dante or Shakespeare. Book XXIV starts after Achilles has avenged his beloved friend Patroclus by killing Hector, and has dragged Hector’s body round the tomb of his friend, having threatened earlier to throw it to the dogs. The gods decide that Hector’s ...”

“... in the alternative allegation that it was a ‘poet’s fable’. This is not a reference to Dante, who does not appear in the controversy, but to the generally fabulous character it shares with much other pre-Reformation religion. There follows, naturally, a chapter on the multiplicity of purgatorial images and stories of the same ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... winds of ‘All creatures of our God and King’. The negative, as Eliot has it in his essay on Dante in The Sacred Wood, ‘is the more importunate’. Which perhaps explains why Walcott’s poetry remains a challenge to taste: either his work is too rich, or our palettes are too ...”

“... tales of the fictional Murdo, part alter ego, part stooge, who was eager to know what magazines Dante had first sent his poems to. The boyish mischief of these pieces was essential to Crichton Smith’s make-up, so that to let it loose was an act of companionable trust and conspiracy rather than a betrayal of his other, more serious themes. The absurdity ...”

“... through democracy: Gregorio has lost faith in activism. One night, at a meeting of Carol’s Dante reading group, Gregorio meets Vin, a dishevelled, computer-savvy fiftysomething who secretly houses the country’s largest anarchist archive. Vin claims never to have paid income tax and has a series of fake IDs that allow him access to the libraries of ...”

“... How the Danish nobleman Brahe or, rather, Tycho – his fame was so great in his time that, like Dante and Galileo, he is known in ours by his first name – came to expire of a burst bladder in Prague is explained, along with much else, by John Robert Christianson. The centre of gravity of Tycho’s Island is Danish social history: in irresistible ...”

“... of responsibility, putting the slightest link on a par with the most obvious crime. And where Dante used this verse scheme’s endlessness for his voyage into the eternal, here, as the next verse is generated in the middle of the previous one for an unbroken 58 pages, the terza rima works to underline colonialism’s unstoppable chain of ...”

“... the (then) new Columbia library. It said ‘Goethe ... Voltaire ... Shakespeare ... Molière ... Dante ...’ And sure enough, just as you’d feared, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, that little football scholarship guy from Lowell, Massachusetts, had wanted his name on the wall too. Yes he did. A few years after his appearance on the Steve Allen ...”

“... Butler ‘did more than either of the other two to help me look at life the way I do’. He named Dante, Gibbon and Tolstoy the greatest of writers and repeatedly expressed his love for War and Peace. He also spoke with reverence of Dostoevsky, on whom he comments with real fervour. More generally, he spoke of three generations of significant novelists, the ...”

“... of that art. The paradox of the Pre-Raphaelites is that they turned for inspiration to Dante and to the daguerreotype – to influences more ancient and more modern than anything afforded by the orthodox artistic training of their time. Modern technology also suggested new shapes. Photographs, when framed or mounted, usually had curved corners, or ...”

“... bandannaed by moonlight,How few and how far between –Disordered and drained, like highlights in Dante’s death mask.Or a sequined dress from the forties – hubba-hubba –Some sequins missing, some sequins inalterably in place.I’m not sure what to make of his claim that ‘hubba-hubba’ is his favourite line in his work (‘I knew it from the second I ...”

“... complexion. Her father, Swynfen Jervis, was a country gentleman, a Radical MP and scholar; both Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti knew the family, where their father had also been a tutor. Agnes was the eldest child; she lost her mother young and had two stepmothers. Rossetti, a boy of 12 when he knew her, admired her looks and her good nature; she was ...”

“... where Heaney is consonantal, guttural and purposefully rough. Heaney’s recent excursion into Dante was unexpected, but it is no surprise to find that Mahon’s new poem ‘The Poet in Residence’ (he was resident poet at the New University of Ulster for a couple of years) is a version of Corbière’s ‘Le Poète Contumace’. Fascination with High ...”