Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Monday 27 April
6:30 PM - 7:30 PM
This event has been cancelled as part of our preventative measures to stem the spread of coronavirus COVID-19. If you have tickets for this event, we’ll be in touch with you directly via email; refunds will be automatically issued.
Find out more about our response to the coronavirus situation here.
What do readers want from critical voices? And what does it mean to judge the art of others? Daniel Mendelsohn is a formidable and impassioned critic – best known for his essays published over many years in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books – and his new book is itself a masterclass in cultural criticism.
The Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones brings together some of Mendelsohn’s finest published essays, on subjects ranging from Euripides and Virgil to Hanya Yanagihara and George R. R. Martin. Mendelsohn’s training as a scholar of classical antiquity is never far from the surface, illuminating contemporary questions – of artificial intelligence, terrorism and popular culture, for example – in startling and entertaining ways.
For Mendelsohn, the craft of criticism is always a creative act, alive with its own dramas and tensions. He'll discuss his critical odyssey in April.
Featuring
Daniel Mendelsohn
Daniel Mendelsohn is the Editor-at-Large of the New York Review of Books and an award-winning memoirist, critic, essayist and translator. A longtime contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review, he has also been a columnist on books, film, TV, and culture for BBC Culture, New York, Harper's, and the New York Times Book Review. His books include the memoirs An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, the internationally bestselling Holocaust family saga The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, and three collections of essays, most recently The Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones.