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James Wood: Afterlives, 14 April 2011

After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell and Purgatory 
by John Casey.
Oxford, 468 pp., £22.50, January 2010, 978 0 19 509295 0
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... Apocalypse of Peter, an apocryphal text from perhaps the early second century, the damned, as in Dante, receive bespoke punishments: blasphemers hang by their tongues, adulterers by their genitals and so on. The history of this iconography, Dante notwithstanding (and Casey is a subtle and admiring analyst of the ...

A Storm in His Luggage

C.K. Stead, 26 January 1995

Ezra Pound and James Laughlin: Selected Letters 
edited by David Gordon.
Norton, 313 pp., £23, June 1994, 0 393 03540 9
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‘Agenda’: An Anthology. The First Four Decades 
edited by William Cookson.
Carcanet, 418 pp., £25, May 1994, 1 85754 069 7
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... fund of feeling ... The content of his work ... cannot be talked about like the doctrines of Dante or the mental machinery of Blake ... It is not to be found in any book or set of books. Only in a very limited way can Mr Pound be discussed as it is necessary to discuss, say, Yeats: with reference to what is implicit and still to be said under the surface ...

Hue and Cry

Arthur C. Danto, 12 May 1994

Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction 
by John Gage.
Thames and Hudson, 335 pp., £38, October 1993, 0 500 23654 2
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... but everything that bears on colour in medieval Latin and Byzantine theology, for example, or in Dante, or in anyone else. We read, for instance, that: ‘What strikes the casual [sic] reader most about this passage is Dante’s self-conscious choice of the French term, alluminar (his version of enluminer), rather than the ...

Excusez-moi

Ian Hamilton, 1 October 1987

The Haw-Lantern 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 52 pp., £7.95, June 1987, 0 571 14780 1
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... role’, but with a new despondency. He enlists the assistance of other artists, from Dante to James Joyce, and yearns guiltily for the ‘clumps’ and ‘clunks’ and ‘clogs’ of his most youthful verses. Not so guiltily, though, that he cannot welcome some jeering Joycean advice: ‘Keep at a tangent. When they make the circle wide, it’s ...

A Single Crash of the Cymbals

Roger Parker, 7 December 1989

Franz Liszt. Vol. II: The Weimar Years 1848-1861 
by Alan Walker.
Faber, 626 pp., £35, August 1989, 0 571 15322 4
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Franz Liszt: A Chronicle of his Life in Pictures and Documents 
by Ernst Burger, translated by Stewart Spencer.
Princeton, 358 pp., £45, October 1989, 0 691 09133 1
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... reputation as a ‘serious’ composer primarily stands: the B minor Piano Sonata, the Faust and Dante symphonies, most of the symphonic poems. Walker attempts to describe the nature and quality of a handful of these works, but, unfortunately, matters of critical judgment remain on the margins of his book. What is more, in the few works he considers in ...

What I believe

Stephen Spender, 26 October 1989

... believe in intellect in the sense in which Proust uses the word here, which is the sense in which Dante used it – though I distrust the term ‘intellectuals’ when it is used today to mean public figures who can be induced to sign manifestos. Proust qualifies religion with the precaution ‘as if’ – as if there were another world with such values. A ...

Bloom’s Giant Forms

Mark Edmundson, 1 June 1989

Ruin the sacred truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present 
by Harold Bloom.
Harvard, 204 pp., £15.95, February 1989, 0 674 78027 2
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Harold Bloom: Towards Historical Rhetorics 
by Peter de Bolla.
Routledge, 155 pp., £25, October 1988, 0 415 00899 9
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... exercise in canon-formation on the large scale, surveying as it does the Yahwist, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Blake and Wordsworth, and moving into our own century, where the light falls on Freud, Kafka and Beckett. What holds these diverse writers together is their ‘strength’, which refers less frequently now to their revisionary powers than it does ...

Joseph Jobson

Patrick Wormald, 18 April 1985

Saladin in his Time 
by P.H. Newby.
Faber, 210 pp., £10.95, November 1983, 0 571 13044 5
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Soldiers of the Faith: Crusaders and Moslems at War 
by Ronald Finucane.
Dent, 247 pp., £12.50, November 1983, 0 460 12040 9
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... was); it was assumed that, like a 19th-century Ottoman sultan, he had a French mother; and Dante placed him among the Noble Pagans in Limbo. His image was enshrined, like those of Robin Hood, Louis XI and Rob Roy, by Sir Walter Scott. In the 20th century, he has inspired that most typical of modern accolades, the debunking biography. Newby’s book ...

Diary

Clive James, 21 October 1982

... a gifted poetess: Sue’s such a doll she’d make Professor Carey Say that she wrote like Dante Alighieri. Sue’s bubble reputation having popped Her teachers must wipe soap out of their eyes, But one would hate to see those young wings cropped Merely because her mentors were not wise. If that compulsive gush of hers is stopped It ought to be because ...

Homer’s Gods

Colin Macleod, 6 August 1981

Homer on Life and Death 
by Jasper Griffin.
Oxford, 218 pp., £12.50, July 1980, 0 19 814016 9
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Homer 
by Jasper Griffin.
Oxford, 82 pp., October 1980, 0 19 287532 9
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Homer: The Odyssey 
translated by Walter Shewring.
Oxford, 346 pp., £7.95, September 1980, 0 19 251019 3
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... design. The toils and the wiles of the hero must go on beyond his return home. (Neither did Dante or Tennyson, for whom Odysseus was above all the restless inquirer, let him stay put at home after his return and triumph.) This is the burden of Tiresias’s prophecy in Book 11, which Odysseus recalls after he and his wife have come together: he has ...

Early Lives

P.N. Furbank, 5 June 1986

The Inner I: British Literary Autobiography of the 20th Century 
by Brian Finney.
Faber, 286 pp., £14.95, September 1985, 0 571 13311 8
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... of art, which exists for others. The dream-like, as practised by Yeats, not to mention Bunyan and Dante, is of course quite a different matter. Muir had a curious and dramatic experience over dreams. At a time when he was under analysis, he was overwhelmed by a flood of inspiring and disturbing mythological dreams. They were waking dreams, which he could ...

Good Repute

M.F. Burnyeat, 6 November 1986

The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation 
edited by Jonathan Barnes.
Princeton, 1250 pp., £53, August 1984, 0 691 09950 2
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... achieved the ascendancy that made him ‘the teacher of those who know’, honoured and admired (Dante continues) by Plato and the whole family of philosophers. Any attempt to explain this long delay in recognition must start from the point that the treatises which comprise The Complete Works of Aristotle were not written for publication. Not only will they ...

Naming the Graces

Charles Hope, 15 March 1984

The Art of Humanism 
by Kenneth Clark.
Murray, 198 pp., £12.50, October 1983, 0 7195 4077 1
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The Eloquence of Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art 
by Edgar Wind, edited by Jaynie Anderson.
Oxford, 135 pp., £25, January 1984, 0 19 817341 5
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... am now eager] to cross into East Germany to see the originals of Botticelli’s illustrations to Dante. I can give the author no higher praise.’ Throughout his life, Clark believed that the modern viewer could understand an artist’s intentions largely through his own aesthetic response, that the appreciation of art was above all a matter of ...

Ambifacts

Gary Taylor, 7 January 1993

Shakespeare: The Later Years 
by Russell Fraser.
Columbia, 380 pp., $35, April 1992, 0 231 06766 6
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Shakespeare: His Life, Work and Era 
by Dennis Kay.
Sidgwick, 368 pp., £20, May 1992, 0 283 99878 4
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William Shakespeare: The Anatomy of an Enigma 
by Peter Razzell.
Caliban, 188 pp., May 1992, 1 85066 010 7
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Politics, Plague and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Stuart Years 
by Leeds Barroll.
Cornell, 249 pp., £20.80, January 1992, 0 8014 2479 8
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Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus 
by Margreta de Grazia.
Oxford, 244 pp., £30, February 1991, 0 19 811778 7
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... is the greatest: ‘he had no rivals, ancient or modern.’ Admirers of Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe or anyone else, see ye the error of your ways, and repent: abandon your idols, and worship the one true god. Fraser devotes three and a half pages (pages 170-74) to the whole of Jacobean drama, brusquely dismissing Webster and Jonson and ...

My space or yours?

Peter Campbell, 17 October 1996

Life on the Screen 
by Sherry Turkle.
Weidenfeld, 250 pp., £18.99, April 1996, 0 297 81514 8
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... online. She quotes one young man who found the log of exchanges between a Beatrice-persona and his Dante-persona empty of the feelings he remembers having as he sat typing – ‘where was the warmth, the sense of complicity and empathy?’ This suggests that computer conversations are flimsy when compared with real-life conversations. But that misses the ...

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