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“... sort out the muddle. ‘I had not thought death had undone so many,’ Eliot said, via the undead Dante, of the crowds flocking across London Bridge to work, and Anne Billson’s very funny novel rests, if that’s the word, on the same joke. Vampires are infiltrating the yuppified London of pre-recession days, the London, essentially, of Martin Amis’s ...”

“... The City of Dreadful Night was mislaid there. Its settled gloom is only part of the explanation. Dante’s Inferno, though gloomier than the Purgatorio and Paradiso, is more popular. Thomson’s inferno is a modern city where the sun never rises and sleepless people wander the dark streets without love, faith or hope. They are kept from suicide by memories ...”

“... collection from 2006, sings in the ‘sweet new style’ and ‘sparse rhyme’ of Petrarch and Dante. Lucretius, with his theory of the clinamen (the uncertain swerve of atoms that gives the universe its unpredictability), is another touchstone: 3 Summers (2016) includes a reworking of the invocation of Venus from his De rerum natura.In 2017, as part of ...”

“... recalled, he ‘was peculiarly well equipped for playing the Waste Land game’.For Eliot’s Dante-quotations and classical learning, he substituted oddments of scientific, medical and psychoanalytical jargon: his magpie brain was a hoard of curious and suggestive phrases from Jung, Rivers, Kretschmer and Freud. He peppered his work liberally with such ...”

“... The word that Esquirol repurposed, alucinari, had signified a wandering in mind, a soul adrift: Dante, most famously, used it to describe the effects of the siren song on Odysseus. But from the late 1830s, when ‘hallucination’ penetrated first clinical and then common language, it cast a medical shadow over the borderlands previously claimed by ...”

“... had stopped. Or rather it had returned to the hour marked by the hands of the clock in the Café Dante, the evening when we met there, just before the place closed.’ Time does turn back, but only briefly. In Voyage de noces, the narrator merely admires the woman, and has found in her an idea of protection he had not known through his mother or anyone ...”

“... subject she first chose to study – her MA thesis was on Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. She loved Dante, whose idea of la diritta via must surely have influenced her ongoing quest to determine each action’s perfect line, what she called ‘the one best way’. At a mechanical level, too, her work always had some connection to writing. She invented her ...”

“... the editor made some advance to her, and she told her husband. Joyce upbraided him in the Piazza Dante, and the painter Silvestri ‘saw tears running down Prezioso’s humiliated face’. Ellmann shows that the results were used effectively in the play Exiles. He seems to assume that Joyce laid the trap deliberately, as a devoted aesthete collecting ...”

“... gave a dinner for him, at which Clare met and became friends with Henry Cary, whose translation of Dante he draws on in ‘To the Snipe’. A week after returning to Helpston, he married Patty Turner, who was pregnant. An announcement of the wedding was placed in the London Magazine, and Hessey sent Clare a Cremona violin. When their first daughter, Anna ...”

“... shamans, virgin births, androgynous gods, and the ‘Virgin mother, daughter to thy son’ whom Dante invoked. By offering an image of difference, the sacred helps to set the rules, to define the norm. Shell argues that Bale and Elizabeth’s joint work converts the transgressive, even tragic reality of incest into a utopian philosophy – that it brings ...”

“... entertainers in the direction of Europe. Eliot’s notion of a coherence which somehow links Dante and Laforgue with Shakespeare and Donne is, of course, a vulgar transatlantic fiction. Derived from wishful thinking and a grab-bag of Harvard survey courses, it led him to extraordinary delusions about confections called tradition, sensibility and ...”

“... the house in which Paul had lived in Tarsus. Since the detailed geography of heaven and hell, pace Dante, is still little known, I make few apologies for recounting what this apocryphal Paul tells us. Heaven has golden gates, with golden pillars inscribed in gold with the names and faces of the righteous few. There are angels with shining faces, and loins girt ...”

“... first decade of the 14th century, the age of Duccio, Giovanni Pisano, and above all of Giotto and Dante. Holmes’s aim is not to explain this achievement (an enterprise he criticises as reductionist) but to make it more intelligible by describing its social environment. This environment includes the rise of the Franciscans in Central Italy as well as the ...”

“... friend, or Lucinda, and suddenly, with his heart-shaped face and red hair and green eyes he’s a Dante Gabriel Rossetti angel. Usually inarticulate, he has moments of blazing eloquence. At his first meeting with Lucinda, on a ship to Australia, he is swept away by a Pascalian vision: We bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it. We calculate the ...”

“... on the one hand this is the voice of an insular sensibility that preferred Langland to Dante, on the other hand this insularity, recognising Church-Latin and Brythonic Welsh as tongues of the insula along with Middle English, is more notable for what it disconcertingly invites in than what it comfortably shuts out.’ ‘Disconcertingly ...”