Daniel Mendelsohn

speaker

599 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 16 Jul

Daniel Mendelsohn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The History of Literature · 817 The Odyssey - Getting Ready for a Summer Blockbuster | My Last Book with Mary Beard · 16 Jul 2026 podcast

I mean the Odyssey is a

A poem about a man who's trying to get back to his wife and son whom he hasn't seen in twenty years.

And these kids are seventeen and eighteen years old.

They can't even envision what it looks like to be

Separated for an amount of time that's longer than their own lifetime.

And my dad was able to bring to the conversation some very poignant.

uh moments, I think, because he knew

what that was like and and many of the things that the Odyssey is about, not least long marriages, were something we knew about.

And when he intervened and spoke about his experiences in that sense, the students were absolutely mesmerized.

You could hear a pin drop.

When he started talking.

So it was an a remarkable experience and

And uh

And then, you know, when the class was over, we found out about this

Mediterranean cruise that the voyages of Odysseus and we did that.

And so, you know, it it became the year of the Odyssey.

And he fell ill and died not long after we got back from Greece.

The book is a a kind of account of the strange and remarkable last year of my dad's life, which in a w wonderful and strange way turned out to be filtered through the Odyssey.

Well, n I mean, to a certain extent.

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