style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">The plot of Inferno, the new blockbuster thriller from Dan Brown, has nothing to do with Dante, but you often feel the author wishing that it did. There are, for instance, vital clues written on the back of Dante Alighieri’s death-mask in the Hall of the Five Hundred in Florence. We find that the book’s arch-villain is – or rather was, for he dies on page one – obsessed with Dante. And when the whole nonsensical story is over, we see our hero, Professor Robert Langdon, the art historian and symbologist from Harvard who has appeared in three previous Brown books, reading a paperback of The Divine Comedy: “Dante’s poem, Langdon was now reminded, was not so much about the misery of hell as it was about the power of the human spirit to endure any challenge, no matter how daunting.”