Simon Mattacks
speaker
2,981 appearances
17 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 13 Sep
Simon Mattacks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 14 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
It is truly a marvel to consider how audiences of the early 90s bought tickets to watch a story that had first appeared in the Middle Ages.
It was the Grail myth again, just reinvented for a new era.
If you stop and think about the last decades of the 20th century, there was really no other time in history when so many different takes on the legend of the Holy Grail coexisted at once.
Highly complicated conspiracy theories were digested side by side with adventure movies, thriller novels, and bawdy stage plays.
One had to simultaneously believe that the Grail was a cup and a bloodline, an artifact and a mystery, a drama of great magnitude and an outrageous comedy.
And somehow, the world was okay with that.
Today, the mythology of the Holy Grail can be found in virtually every aspect of our culture.
It has been mentioned in a song by famous R&B stars.
It is featured in multiple video games.
In fact, the idea of perfection has come to be represented by the expression, the Holy Grail, such as, this is the Holy Grail of pencil sharpeners, or
This is the holy grail of marketing, or this recipe is the holy grail of cheesecake baking.
Anything that represents the ultimate achievement is its own holy grail.
The appendix of Richard Barber's exhaustive book on the topic has a particularly interesting chart.
He compiled the mentions of the term Holy Grail in major newspapers from 1878 to 2002.
Just to give you an idea of the scope, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine used the term 280 times during that time span.
More impressive, the Washington Post stood out for its love affair with the expression.
Racking up 628 uses, this American newspaper showed a trend of increasing almost every year.
That trend is also played out by the UK paper, The Times, suggesting that by the turn of the 21st century, the grail was more entrenched in our culture than it ever was before.
With such a vast history behind it, the story of the Grail has had incredible staying power.
Barber suggests that this is because it was a vessel that each subsequent generation could fill up with its own yearnings and beliefs.
Showing 2521–2540 of 2,981 · page 127 of 150
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