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“... people, not monsters. And I absolutely do not want to be known as the modern-day Virgil who leads Dante through Hell (however much I may love Shalamov) … So I have omitted, as they say, the most heartrending details of camp life. I did not lure my readers on with promises of thrills and strange sights. I would have preferred to lead them up to a ...”

“... hell. Some European scholars maintain that a Latin translation of this work might have given Dante a few ideas. The stunning illustrations in this 15th-century copy were exquisitely calligraphed by Malik Bakshi of Herat (now in Afghanistan) in the Uighur script. There are 61 illustrations in all, created with great love for the Prophet. He is depicted ...”

“... all frame their ‘disclosures’ in relation to a literary model (the Odyssey in Meadowlands, Dante in Vita Nova and Shakespeare in The Seven Ages), thus signalling the contrived or artful character of these putatively expressive poems. To Glück, the ‘confessional’ mode is odious. In ‘Education of the Poet’, a brief literary ...”

“... his rescue of Guinevere, but it still allows her to name him. This prose Lancelot was part of Dante’s favourite reading; and it served him as a model both for the damnable (his Paolo and Francesca are seduced into adultery by reading it) and for the sublime, when Dante’s own name is first heard within the Divine ...”

“... understanding’, not merely as a literary mode. In it Benjamin discussed Spenser, Dante and the German dramatists but argued that allegory is present in any and all artful expression: that it constitutes ‘expression – just as language is expression, just as writing is’. Whatever the truth of Benjamin’s claim that ‘Baudelaire’s ...”

“... floats in a Mardi Gras parade. He was convinced he had accomplished something comparable to Dante or Shakespeare, and kept his curtains closed while writing, believing the rays of brilliance flying from the pages would disturb the neighbours and might even reach as far as China. Devastated by the lack of attention La Doublure received on publication (he ...”

“... the wicked Count Fosco of St John’s Wood. The travesty was probably relayed to Wilkie Collins by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose exiled father had met Foscolo once and did not get on with him at all. By the spring of 1824, with Floriana’s inheritance spent and the tradesmen-creditors massing, Digamma had to be abandoned. After that Foscolo’s life descended ...”

“... Origo’s account of Datini’s activities, one will learn more, and more that is important, from Dante. It follows from Origo’s vain assignment to recreate an ‘age’ that, paradoxically, she is eager to discern the ‘timeless’. Timeless, so it would appear, is something that she calls ‘the Tuscan mind’, but also more universal things. She remarks ...”

“... poem, written quite soon after his arrival in New York, he imagines himself being judged by Dante, Blake, Rimbaud, Dryden, Catullus, Tennyson, Baudelaire, Rilke, Hardy ‘and many others’, and makes confession of his faults: Time and again have slubbered through With slip and slapdash what I do, Adopted what I would disown, The preacher’s loose ...”

“... in a variety of genres: French fabliaux, highfalutin romances, novellini or tiny tales, as well as Dante and Ovid. The stories rebuild the relationships, scams and interconnections – literary, economic, sexual – which hold the normal world together, and range in setting from the back streets of Florence to Constantinople and beyond. Boccaccio spent his ...”

“... on to an anecdote about Coleridge, and stutters out with short meditations on Frost; Petrarch and Dante are shoehorned into the afterword). There are sexy deaths and dull deaths, early deaths and lingering ones, uncanny predictions, like Auden’s, and deaths where poets lost their words first, like Stevie Smith after her stroke. There are disappearing acts ...”

“... as he was. Burne-Jones, escaping to London, entered into a star-struck pseudo-apprenticeship under Dante Gabriel Rossetti, for whom, he later said, he would willingly have ‘been chopped up’. The oddness and severe limits of this artistic education, which Elizabeth Prettejohn emphasises in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition of Burne-Jones’s work at ...”

“... book is littered with hopeful falsehoods. There is Lear’s bare forked animal, plenty of Milton, Dante (that proto-Catholic with his slightly confusing ideas about purgatory) and possibly Yeats (‘Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?’). Jack carries Robert Frost around in his pocket, finds ‘good old Leaves of Grass’ in a bookshop, misses Hart ...”

“... that few people had read as much and as intelligently. Marx learned Italian from reading Dante and Machiavelli, Spanish from studying Cervantes and Calderón, and Russian from reading Pushkin. He was thus one of the earliest practitioners of Goethe’s concept of world literature, an idea that has produced some of the finest critical writing of our ...”

“... and Corruption. In scholastic writings, Aristotle is called simply ‘the Philosopher’, while Dante honoured him as ‘the Master of Those Who Know’. In this context, Albert set himself the ambitious project of paraphrasing and commenting on every Aristotelian text he could find – an enterprise that occupied him from roughly 1250 to 1270 – to purge ...”