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The Bad Boy of Athens - Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R408
Discovery Miles 4 080
You Save: R102
(20%)
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The Bad Boy of Athens - Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones (Hardcover)
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List price R510
Loot Price R408
Discovery Miles 4 080
You Save R102 (20%)
Expected to ship within 5 - 10 working days
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'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 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.
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