The Bad Boy of Athens

Mendelsohn takes the classical costumes off figures like Virgil and Sappho, Homer and Horace He writes about things so clearly they come to feel like some of the most important things you have ever been told. Sebastian Barry Over the past three decades, Daniel Mendelsohns 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 Homers 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 Sapphos sexuality and the feminism of Game of Thrones; on how Virgils Aeneid prefigures post-World War II history and why we are still obsessed with the Titanic; on Patrick Leigh Fermors final journey, Karl Ove Knausgaards autofiction and the plays of Tom Stoppard, Tennessee Williams, and Nol Coward. The collection ends with a poignant account of the authors 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 todays master of popular criticism using the ancient past to reach into the very heart of modern culture.