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Discovering Dante, wrote his translator Dorothy Sayers, was like reading The Three Musketeers at the age of 13. No one had told her 'the one great, obvious, glaring fact about Dante Alighieri of Florence - that he was simply the most incomparable story-teller who ever set pen to paper'. A.N. Wilson, whose biographical subjects have ranged from Milton and Walter Scott to Tolstoy and C.S. Lewis, from Hilaire Belloc, John Betjeman and Iris Murdoch to Jesus and Hitler, last year published a new biography, Dante in Love, in which he described The Divine Comedy as the 'greatest of all European poems'. 'Florence - minter of florins - was the economic hub of thirteenth-century Europe,' he has written. 'This fundamental fact underlay Dante's life and work, his obsessive hope for a new Emperor-Deliverer, his contempt for the abuse of papal power, his quest for the ideal social order of Catholic Europe.' With Robin Kirkpatrick, Professor of Italian and English Literature at Robinson College, Cambridge, Wilson discusses Dante and his Europe.

In partnership with the European Commission in the UK.