The Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones

The Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones
Daniel Mendelsohn

‘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 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 Noël 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.

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Copyright (#u9c4703b1-3e9c-5022-92d5-d2e5d3451e78)

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Daniel Mendelsohn 2019

Cover image © Shutterstock, wings by Jo Walker

Daniel Mendelsohn asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007545155

Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780007545162

Version: 2019-05-09

Dedication (#u9c4703b1-3e9c-5022-92d5-d2e5d3451e78)

For

M. M. McCabe,

Patrick McGrath,

and all my other McGrath cousins

Contents

1  Cover (#ub3c69ff0-35aa-54e6-974d-e1bddc90d97d)

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Contents (#u9c4703b1-3e9c-5022-92d5-d2e5d3451e78)

6  Preface

7  The Robots Are Winning!

8 Girl, Interrupted

9 Not an Ideal Husband

10  The Bad Boy of Athens

11  Alexander, the Movie!

12  The Strange Music of Horace

13  Epic Fail?

14  The Women and the Thrones

15  Unsinkable

16  Not Afraid of Virginia Woolf

17  White or Grey?

18  The Two Oscar Wildes

19  The Tale of Two Housmans

20  Bitter-Sweet

21  The Collector

22  The End of the Road

23  I, Knausgaard

24  A Lot of Pain

25  The American Boy

26  Acknowledgements