Dante’s Divine Comedy
by Ian Thomson, Head of Zeus, 280pp, £18.99
The notion of a literary canon is an unfashionable one. On English courses throughout the country long-forgotten books are being reconsidered alongside previously unassailable classics. Broadly speaking, I’m in favour of this, and can see the value in challenging how and why certain books are thought of as classics while other equally interesting works are ignored. The only downside of this process of reading-list expansion and re-evaluation is that we have lost a sense of shared intellectual heritage: those books that we can all agree are worth reading over all others.
