Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from Greeks to GoT

Over the past three decades, Daniel Mendelsohn`s essays and reviews have earned him a reputation as `our most irresistible literary critic` (New York Times). This striking new collection exemplifies the way in which Mendelsohn - a classicist by training - uses the classics as a lens to think about urgent contemporary debates. There is much to surprise here. Mendelsohn invokes the automatons featured in Homer`s epics to help explain the AI films Ex Machina and Her, and perceives how Ted Hughes sought redemption by translating a play of Euripides (the `bad boy of Athens`) about a wayward husband whose wife returns from the dead. There are essays on Sappho`s sexuality and the feminism of Game of Thrones; on how Virgil`s Aeneid prefigures post-World War II history and why we are still obsessed with the Titanic; on Patrick Leigh Fermor`s final journey, Karl Ove Knausgaard`s autofiction and the plays of Tom Stoppard, Tennessee Williams, and Noel Coward. The collection ends with a poignant account of the author`s boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault, which inspired his ambition to become a writer. In The Bad Boy of Athens, Mendelsohn provokes and dazzles with erudition, emotion and tart wit while his essays dance across eras, cultures and genres. This is a provocative collection which sees today`s master of popular criticism using the ancient past to reach into the very heart of modern culture.