Daniel Mendelsohn’s Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones is an uncommon collection of essays that intertwine the personal with the intellectual and critical. A student of the Classics, Mendelsohn says he writes to share his excitement about so often discovering, in contemporary materials, shadows of the great classics that formed the Western mind—passions that reach us from our past. Topics include Sappho of Lesbos, Karl Ove Knausgård writing about Mein Kampf, and Mendelsohn’s boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault, who inspired him to study the Classics.