-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 BarryOver 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 an
