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“... what Bahrām-Gušnasp would have made of the image.Lilith also fascinated the Pre-Raphaelites. In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith, she is an auburn-haired beauty admiring her image in a mirror, surrounded by roses and poppies. Rossetti wrote a sonnet to accompany the painting, where she is the ‘witch he [Adam] loved before the gift of ...”

“... to the great poets of the past. In his central book, Varianti e altra linguistica, the essays on Dante and Petrarch – essays which for their combination of learning and penetration excel even those of his master, Ernst Robert Curtius – there is nothing said which he was not equally ready to say, mutatis mutandis, about Montale. He studied the poetry of ...”

“... his poems and the words used by other writers, both famous and obscure, in texts that range from Dante’s Divine Comedy to an anonymous scribe’s record of the Acts and Resolutions of the 29th General Assembly of Iowa (1902). The lines of Eliot’s that most often occurred to me as I worked my way through these thousand or so pages of commentary (set in ...”

“... clearly tendentious title? Mark Twain, Clifton Fadiman wrote, is ‘our Chaucer, our Homer, our Dante, our Virgil, because Huckleberry Finn is the nearest thing we have to a national epic. Just as the Declaration of Independence ... contains in embryo our whole future history as a nation, so the language of Huckleberry Finn (another Declaration of ...”

“... Vasari must have repressed the urge to censor this giant who was, as Rubin points out, compared to Dante by his contemporaries. Florentines were painfully conscious that Dante died in exile and was buried far away in Ravenna. Michelangelo could never in his old age be lured back to Medici Florence, but Cosimo wasted no time ...”

“... One of the most active of Montale’s previous translators was under the impression that Dante employed the word libello to mean ‘libel’ instead of ‘little book’. A dedicated and knowledgeable student of the tradition from which he emerged, Montale was a stickler for detail, so Mr Galassi’s wide competence comes as a particular ...”

“... criminality is to be found in them. The fullest reference is in Cristoforo Landino’s edition of Dante, published in 1481. In his discursive introduction to this, Landino has a long passage about the excellence of Florentine artists, in which Castagno is eloquently praised as a ‘lover of the difficulties of art’, and a painter of great vividness and ...”

“... were entirely with the Italians: he had studied in Rome in 1925, fancied himself a connoisseur of Dante and of Italian civilisation and, by his own admission, paid no attention to the rise of Fascism. Many Times readers rightly detected Fascist sympathies in his copy. In his book about the conflict, Eyewitness in Abyssinia (1937), Matthews directed scorn at ...”

“... and seemingly intractable predicament invites a range of responses and role models. From Dante onwards Italy had been described as plagued by factionalism and inertia, dwarfed by the glories of ancient Rome, hampered by a powerful church whose interests were universal rather than national, and thus laid open to every foreign predator. ‘The most ...”

“... study Florence, partly, perhaps, because the Florentines were always changing their constitution (Dante compared the city to an invalid in bed, always changing her position and always uncomfortable), and partly because the sources are richer. In Florence, there was an official record of who said what in important debates; in Venice, there was not. Very ...”

“... the opposite persuasion. The Chairman who won his affection most was an ex-headmaster steeped in Dante. It is a British High Commissioner that he describes to Tracey as ‘one of the greatest men I’ve ever met in my life’. Perhaps this is just part of the unsolved conundrum, the national debate adjourned without a division, in which modes, manners and ...”

“... as legal tender. We, too, can invoke history to explain our hesitation. Seven hundred years ago, Dante wrote King Milutin of Rascia into the book that lies open on the Day of Judgment. Milutin’s sin, the imperial eagle explains to the poet in the Paradiso, was to forge Venetian ducats (‘il conio di Vinegia’). Today his remote descendant Milan ...”

“... about myself. I feel I have been dead for ten years now, and my ghost doesn’t walk. Dante has nothing to tell me about Hell that I don’t know for myself.’ Bunting’s poem was completed in a year. At least a couple of reliable commentators think the original version of the poem ran to 20,000 lines. In its final form it is about 700. Although ...”

“... a pure Latin – and, by an extension of the same skills, a pure Tuscan, based on the writings of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio – was distinctive. His training as a scholar began early. In June 1491 Angelo Poliziano, a Florentine poet and philologist, visited Venice. There he studied, among many other things, the ancient manuscript of Terence’s plays that ...”

“... passing literary judgment on The Lord of the Rings. ‘His admirers cannot resist comparing him to Dante, Malory, or Blake, with the necessary proviso that Tolkien is incomparable.’ Are they among these admirers? It’s not clear that even Tolkien’s fellow Inklings were that keen. ‘Oh God, not another fucking elf!’ the English lecturer and long-time ...”