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“... poem chose to ‘parody’ the earlier master, just as Eliot in the Quartets makes deference to a Dante a thousand years ...”

“... when they had ‘changed the story-line around a little’, to make it ‘the Divine Comedy by Dante, instead of a straight life of the BVM’. They had just ‘got it all tied up with this canonisation, God damn it, she was the BVM incarnate, she had it in the bag.’ We must leave The Recognitions and press on to Carpenter’s Gothic, pausing for a brief ...”

“... in 1977, but the subjects are ones he could have lectured on at almost any date after 1930 – Dante, the Thousand and One Nights, Buddhism, the Kabbala, Nightmares, Blindness, Poetry. These are old lectures remembered – which is to say, refined by time, in that temporal process of distortion and oblivion which Borges saw it as his task to mimic. The ...”

“... on his temple (from which Socrates, outwardly a satyr, adopted it), was self-knowledge, and Dante began the Paradiso with a prayer to him: ‘Enter my breast and infuse me with your spirit, as you did when you tore Marsyas from the covering of his limbs.’ Plato said that the strains of the pipes, which he excluded from the Republic, indicated those ...”

“... Huxley on ‘a favourite topic: the poorness of all literature’: Homer was terribly overrated, Dante was hopelessly limited, Shakespeare was such a stupid man, Goethe was such a bore, Tolstoy was silly etc. We had disposed of nearly everybody, and Aldous was really enjoying himself – until a nasty doubt struck him: ‘What about Lope de Vega? I’ve ...”

“... dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely. And because Dante says that no one understands anything unless he retains [it], I have jotted down what I have profited from in their conversation and composed a short study, De principatibus.Even now, at the distance of five centuries, Machiavelli’s words in The Prince ...”

“... of it and not to make money – and that’s the spirit in which he approached his adventures. The Dante-quoting, ‘O sole mio’-singing butcher in Tuscany affected to be an amateur too, one who made money through his art but who despised the world of – spitting out the English with sarcastic emphasis – ‘bizzzness’: ‘I have a bad bizzzness. I am ...”

“... him with the Pre-Raphaelites, and when he arrived in London he ‘practically stalked’ Dante Gabriel Rossetti until the poet and painter took him on as a kind of apprentice. When Morris came to live in London later that year, he and Burne-Jones shared lodgings in Bloomsbury, paid for by Morris’s mother, and a subsequent visit from Ruskin himself ...”

“... them, it would just be literature, just fiction, and worthless. However, I could counter that Dante, for example, had written just fiction, that Cervantes had written fiction and that Melville had written just fiction. It was irrefutable that being human would not be the same if these three works had not existed. So why not write just fiction? Good ...”

“... lunar episode is at once a celestial revelation like Cicero’s ‘Dream of Scipio’ or Dante’s Paradiso and a burlesque of this tradition. As such revelations tend to, it takes a long-distance view in order to make our worldly goals look like follies, but Ariosto’s Moon is exalted only literally; it is not a heaven, but an allegorical mirror of ...”

“... but his wife, Elena Alexsandrovna, took odd jobs to keep the pair alive, and this devotee of Dante and Goethe ended up teaching accountancy to pig farmers as part of the collectivisation effort. Having served his time in Kazakhstan, he settled in Saransk, where he lived for a while in a disused jail and taught at the Pedagogical Institute as a one-man ...”

“... to some kind of analysis, but in the thick of it one feels more need of a Dostoevsky or even a Dante than a study from the Department of Social Security. Judy’s apartment has been turned over to five young Mexicans, illegal itinerant carpenters. Three of them are there, the other two are in hospital. In pitch darkness – the electricity to the apartment ...”

“... ran ‘Murder, metaphor and memory’; the Catholic Herald, ‘A lusty Beatrice leads her Dante’; the Literary Review, ‘A sensitivity . . . unusual in a man’ (or was that code for Alice Thomas Ellis having cottoned on?); the Oldie didn’t go for the sex much but spoke of Lorca and Pasolini sharing the same Mediterranean Catholic mind as ...”

“... devoted herself to her salons and her writing: an Essai sur la liberté, a comparative study of Dante and Goethe, a history of the early Dutch Republic, three historical dramas, articles on politics, religion and morality, and her memoirs. This is an oddly monotonous period in both biographies, enlivened only by Marie’s wit. Her late comment on the great ...”

“... and Frith was not alone among artists in aspiring to photographic accuracy or, as it seemed to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, literalism; he complained to William Bell Scott that most of the Academy pictures that year were ‘done in prose’. But this was what the general art-viewing public of the mid-Victorian years liked, a picture with a story they could ...”