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

And I mean, not in the sense that if you love the Iliad, you don't also love the Odyssey, but I mean temperamentally, because they're both so different.

Each represents a quite different worldview.

Each is very stylistically and ideologically often quite different to the other.

So I've always been an Odyssey person and and you know quite a lot of my own

writing, even on non-classical subjects, I think is influenced by the Odyssey.

You know, the Odyssey is above all a story about a storytelling.

You know, there's a kind of meta level to it.

Not only Odysseus himself, who of course is a great storyteller and also a great

fabulous and a great liar, if we can be honest.

Uh but you know, everyone

that he encounters in his far flung adventures turns out to have an interesting story, you know.

So the Odyssey is a story that is very interested in both the contents of

other people's stories and also the m I want to call it the mechanics of storytelling.

You know, the Odyssey is very alert to people's different storytelling styles and whether people are good at telling stories.

And, you know, there are scenes in which

crowds of people are gathered around someone listening to a story and they'll applaud at the end of the story or react at the end of the story.

And since in my own work I've always very interested in in sort of narrative, you know, both as a writer and also as a critic.

I think I just responded to that quality, that that element of the Odyssey really from the get go.

Even though probably at the age of nine I I wouldn't have been able to articulate what I'm telling you now, I felt that it was for me because I was

I was already interested in, you know, stories.

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