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“... Africa. A small imperial army under Belisarius (Procopius’ hero, interestingly reimagined by Robert Graves) routed the usurper Gelimer not once but twice: in 533-34, the Vandal kingdom crumpled with no further hint of resistance. Buoyed by that near miraculous success, Justinian set his sights on Italy, where another murderous succession squabble ...”

“... are of course novels about Jesus – in fact, Burgess wrote one of them, Man of Nazareth – and Robert Graves did Milton as well as Jesus and Claudius. Doubtless there are many more such biographical novels, forgotten or unread by me. They don’t seem very popular, though there was Lloyd Douglas’s bestselling The Robe, which amazed the experienced ...”

“... as an adult. But in the mid-20th century he was the most popular poet in the United States after Robert Frost, and from early in his career, among the most admired by writers and critics. It wasn’t just the usual modernist suspects like Pound, Williams, Stevens and Marianne Moore who sang his praises, but other, very different kinds of poet too: ...”

“... humour. It amused as well as suited him to conceal his sexual nature, and he was delighted when Robert Graves once held forth to him about that of Wilfred Owen: ‘All that about “the poetry is in the pity” – really it’s as if you or I were looking at a battlefield covered with the bodies of beautiful girls.’ Plomer had a rich social ...”

“... example, she says more than once that Hemingway proved to be a better writer about the war than Robert Graves or Siegfried Sassoon, even though they saw a lot more fighting than he did, precisely because he was not, as they were, hampered by a literary education and training in ‘conventional strategies of expression’. A similar point is made about ...”

“... the left foreleg of a sheep or pig, but some face west, in which case it is the right foreleg. The graves which contain actual chariots have a different system. Is this a matter of social gradations? Competing cults? Just as inscrutable is the much later Roman cremated while sitting in a chair with a cockerel in his lap. Was the cockerel a meal? To wake him ...”

“... the trees./The cheapest dance-song utters all they feel.’ The lines prompted sharp comment from Robert Graves, which caused Lewis to write to him, defending the poem as an expression of ‘simple cosmic loneliness’. Graves replied: ‘To feel cosmic loneliness I think means merely that one is short of friends who ...”

“... told another friend. He wasn’t to be taken as seriously as a distinguished foreigner like Ernst Robert Curtius might think; and Eliot wrote to someone else that he had ‘never found any writer whose views were so antipathetic to me as Murry’s’. Murry seems not to have understood that his polemical position meant they couldn’t have lunch, and must ...”

“... As was, and remains, his custom, he nosed about on his own. One early non-Modernist influence was Robert Graves, and the ‘brusque conversational tone’ in some of his poetry. In the mid-1950s, the poet Gael Turnbull, who was editing a special British number for Cid Corman’s magazine Origin, took an interest in Fisher’s work and invited him to his ...”

“... simultaneously reinforces the notion that to be homosexual is abnormal. Seymour-Smith’s life of Robert Graves was respectful, sympathetic and engrossing; his book on Kipling is not so much a critical biography as a poor relation of Flaubert’s Parrot or Anthony Burgess’s highly speculative novel about Shakespeare, Nothing Like the ...”

“... his elaboration of Anne Wylde’s symbolic significance. For Hughes (who seems to have studied his Robert Graves particularly thoroughly) Anne is nothing less than Nature, the feminine principle made flesh, and he enlists her in this role to lead a sustained attack on what he takes to be the male principle made flesh, or science, technology, trade, the ...”

“... connected) had crossed the Channel: Geoffrey Winthrop Young, George Trevelyan, Geoffrey Keynes, Robert Graves (a former pupil) and Rupert Brooke (a contemporary at Magdalene). Another friend, Lytton Strachey, was renowned for his obsession with Mallory’s good looks (he credited him ‘with the face of a Botticelli’). In April 1915, Mallory wrote to ...”

“... or indeed literary ones; I took vicarious pride in knowing that it had been the regiment of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and David Jones. They had no successors in my time. In Jamaica the officers lived a cheerfully philistine life, playing polo, attending cocktail parties and spending weekends on the beaches of the north coast. The other ranks ...”

“... appeared confused, irritated or bored by him, classic reactions of age to the heroes of youth. Robert Carringer’s sharp-eyed, dispassionate post-mortem on what actually happened in the making of Kane, and Barbara Leaming’s almost embarrassingly intimate monitoring of the variations in the maker’s oft-told tales during what turned out to be the last ...”

“... Ee. Gaw. Lonker. Pit. Gaw: a Fife word for a drainage furrow. I walk each day past rows of Pictish graves. Fife Council’s laying mud-brown plastic drainpipes Down the dead-straight leyline of a Pictish road. Croy. Ee. Gaw. Lonker. Pit. Lonker: a hole in a wall, a yett through which Sheep may slip, or a burn, a stream flow under. Every wall, from Hadrian’s ...”