Amid the wealth of detail there are a few factual errors and some dubious assumptions. Michelangelo's David is in Florence's Accademia Gallery, not the Bargello, as Wilson claims. And it's a bit startling to find a biographer of Milton misquoting "Lycidas".  The lines are not "Fame is the spur which the clear spirit doth raise/The last infirmity of noble days," as Wilson has it, but "Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise/(That last infirmity of Noble mind"). In his discussion of Dante's encounter with his beloved teacher Brunetto Latini in the circle of the sodomites, Wilson remarks that "it is surely not fanciful to suppose that in his encounter with Brunetto, he is, among other things, facing his own adolescent homosexuality?" But surely, in the absence of any evidence, such a supposition is fanciful. More alarming is Wilson's discomfort with the sheer virulence of Dante's various hatreds. He writes, "The serene scholarly poet sits side by side at the desk with the vengeful malicious madman and the reader never knows which of them is going to frame the next taut terza rima." Wilson harps on this throughout, at one point going so far as to refer to "the Tourette's Syndrome Dante." This is nonsense. Wilson fails to see that Dante's hatred both of malefactors and of his personal enemies is as hot and quick and incandescent as his love. Dante was a great hater. As Wilson's own account makes plain, he lived in an age of extremes, an age of vehemence; in the Paradiso, even St Peter is thunderous in denunciation. Dante shared the ferocity of the psalmist when he exclaimed, "Lord, I hate Thy enemies with a perfect hatred." Dante's hates are in a mysterious way the obverse of his loves; they are inextricably correlated; each sets the other in passionate relief.

If the excitement with Dante which Wilson wishes to stimulate is largely lacking this may be because he almost never engages with Dante's verse purely as poetry. He clearly loves the poetry — he has been reading and studying it for decades in Italian and in translation — and he quotes copiously from it in an impressive range of translations. But the non-reader of Dante might be puzzled by the absence of any close attention to the actual verse. Wilson is right to say of terza rima, for example, that "its Trinitarian significance suited his purpose, but so too did its forward movement." But there's more to terza rima than simple forward movement. Throughout the Commedia, Dante's singing cadences impel the verses forward — true enough — while the interlacing triple rhymes provide brief intervals of rest, like pauses in a melody. The effect is one of braided momentum.

This has a bearing on the extraordinary music of Dante's verse which Wilson scarcely notices. One example: when Dante encounters Paolo and Francesca in the wind-tossed circle of the lustful, he listens spellbound as Francesca delivers her seductive self-justifying soliloquy. When she describes their first kiss, she says, la bocca mi baciò tutto tremante (He kissed my mouth all tremblingly). It may be the sexiest evocation of a kiss in literature; its sounds, its cadence, virtually nuzzle the ear. Six lines later, in the conclusion of the canto, Dante faints and the verse both echoes and rebukes Francesca: E caddi come corpo morto cade ("And I fell as a dead body falls"). The terza rima, cunningly intertwined, intensifies such effects. Here the hard c of bocca (mouth), repeated four times, is anything but seductive; it cuts like a knife through silk.

Since language itself, whether bestial in hell or angelic in paradise, with the hard human stammering of purgatory in between, constitutes one of Dante's principal themes, it seems inexplicable that Wilson, apart from a few cursory comments, should so neglect it. Interested readers should turn instead to Irma Brandeis's The Ladder of Vision or the work of the late American dantista Glauco Cambon — neither of whom is listed in Wilson's extensive bibliography — to get a sense of how much Wilson has overlooked. Dante in Love gives us everything we need to know about Dante; only the incomparable living texture of the poetry is strangely absent.