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“... 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 ...”

“... and purgatorial fire were conventional poetic images – indeed conventional metaphors for poetry (Dante called Arnaut Daniel il miglior fabbro). In some respects 16th-century poems can seem like modern advertising copy. Showers of tears and arrows, dazzling eyes, mountain roads, and imprisoned souls recur with the frequency of floating hair, crashing surf and ...”

“... and Joyce. He started wearing pigskin gloves and arranging to be caught ‘muttering snatches of Dante and Gerard Manley Hopkins to himself’, but he also worked steadily on Call It Sleep. It was impressive talent-spotting on Walton’s part, since his only publication so far was a student piece called ‘Impressions of a Plumber’. And she was supportive ...”

“... you?’ Wilson was the son of a lawyer, a bit chilly, a prodigious reader steeped in Plato and Dante. He thought Fitzgerald’s remark foolish – just what you might expect from a man who had been reading novelists like Booth Tarkington and H.G. Wells. But Wilson respected Fitzgerald’s ardour; he believed that was how a young man of talent should ...”

“... The Mandelstams, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva make appearances. Rilke drops in, mocked by Karl Kraus. Dante and Wallace Stevens are silently cited. Obviously there is never a dull moment, though the sum total of those moments seems duller than they are. There is an old argument about texture and structure in poetry, and John Crowe Ransom thought that although you ...”

“... stablehand, fell with tedious predictability for two of the most notorious seducers of the age, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt; but her husband seems to have managed the matter well, and this book discerns a (qualified) sexual enlightenment in him which other biographers have overlooked. Morris was born in 1834, the child of a wealthy ...”

“... At their best they can be imaginative tours d’ horizon from Homer to Nietzsche, by way of Dante and Tolstoy, a critical genealogy of the ideas and assumptions which construct the Present. More usually, they represent a brisk exercise in joining up the geniuses. The reason these courses have not hitherto gained much ground in Britain may well be our ...”

“... depends on a biology that is eroding fast. He sees the end of the world through the words of Dante and the Sun. Perduta Gente ends with the cut-up newspaper versions of the syllables ‘dis tress’ and ‘con tam’, one overprinted imperfectly on the other. Exegi monumentum aere perennius – for Reading, a religious poet without God, monuments are a ...”

“... is reversed. When Cave writes about the Middle Ages he has nothing to say about the recognition by Dante of the burned features of Brunetto Latini or (still more majestic) Ben son, ben son Beatrice. It is true that Cave is too good a critic not to be aware of the ‘extraordinary consoling power at the end’ of The Winter’s Tale. But then the endless ...”

“... Antiquity to do so. Foster’s position can be summarised as follows: in mid-life Petrarch, like Dante, underwent some kind of spiritual crisis which led to a radical redirection of his literary energies and talents. In Petrarch’s case this crisis can be dated in the years immediately following Laura’s death (though her death was only one factor among ...”

“... in Venice, with Paolo Sarpi looking back at the Council of Trent from outside Italy, and with Dante as a literary visitor to Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. These men act as eloquent ciceroni, guiding her along the highways and byways of the territories she is visiting. Her relationship to her ciceroni raises some important questions, however. To ...”

“... As Augustine remarked, ‘the circles have been shattered by the coming of the Redeemer.’ Dante plays on an altered chronological scale: the pilgrim pursues an ultimately upward trajectory, advancing on God’s path. But a new and nagging irony has been introduced, as Brunetto Latini performs his perpetual circles on the burning sands. The problems of ...”

“... the grounds that the coming of Christ to save humankind would not then be universal; in contrast, Dante, writing in the early 1300s, accounted for the distribution of land and water over the globe by the entirely naturalistic theory that a protuberance in the sphere of earth-matter was drawn out by the influence of the stars. The contraction of the scope of ...”

“... for us that the time is long since past.’ These young men – Bekker, who ‘would translate Dante as he had never been translated before’; Bavink, obsessively working on a landscape painting called View of Rhenen; Hoyer, who was ‘going to work on his social duty’ – were burning with ambition, ‘doing our best to believe that we would still ...”

“... and idealistic’, while the other two are more historical, satirical and angry, ‘as if Dante had wandered in reverse’. The entire trilogy was written by hand, Cărtărescu says, over many years, from start to finish without rewrites, cuts, additions or revisions; he describes the result as ‘a crisp and genuine image … scanning and mapping my ...”