The ‘words’ chapter is a masterpiece of close reading of Dante’s text, in which Shaw takes us on a great roller-coaster, by the end China PU anti-fatigue mat Manufacturers of which we know about Dante’s heroes and contemporaries Guinizzelli and Arnaut Daniel; we have explored the everlasting resourcefulness with which Dante adapts his language for separate episodes (coarse for the language of Hell, sublime for that of Heaven).” I have read many books on Dante, but never one in English which more tellingly caught this ‘energy circuit’.’ Typical of Shaw’s breadth is that, while placing the episode firmly within the context of the Divine Comedy, she is also leading our minds into the version of Lord Tennyson, and the mindset of hero-adventurers like Captain Scott. You never come to the end of it.

There is a sublime meditation on the nature of journeys, and what we hope from them, and the apt and haunting memory of Primo Levi in Auschwitz reciting the great speech by Ulysses in his head: ‘Considerate la vostra semenza . Lewis in his book The Discarded Image, was able, from the depth and width of a lifetime’s reading, to make known to the lay reader how the medieval eye saw the stars and the planets and how the medieval mind conceived of the outer world and of mathematics and science. But Shaw alerts us to the way in which Dante pays homage to Virgil’s poetry itself.book 1. On page after page, it makes us if we are first-time readers blink in wonder, or if we are old hands who thought we knew Dante feel as though we are understanding him for the first time.

Reading Dante is an experience of a lifetime.To go back to the beginning for I started this review, as Dante did his Comedy, in the middle of things Shaw guides us with steadfast certainty through the Florence of Dante’s boyhood, through his friendships and his political ambitions, through the larger picture of medieval Europe, and the rancour between papalists and imperialists. You never come to the end of it. For example, at the very beginning, when Dante is lost in the dark wood, he cries out to Virgil, not in Italian but in Latin ‘Miserere di me, gridai a lui!’ It is a cunning and conscious echo of two things of the Catholic’s penitential psalm (Number 50) and of Aeneas’s cry, in the sixth book, for help from the Sybil before descending into the underworld. 

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