Robert Graves

Robert Graves wrote I, Claudius, Goodbye to All That and The White Goddess, and spent most of his life on Mallorca refusing to be an English man of letters. He went from school to the Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1914, was so badly wounded on the Somme in 1916 that his death was reported in The Times and he read his own obituary, and came out of the war with what would now be called post-traumatic stress and a permanent contempt for the society that had run it. Goodbye to All That, published in 1929, is his farewell to England: a memoir written fast and for money, brutal about the war, and it cost him the friendship of Siegfried Sassoon. He moved to Mallorca with the poet Laura Riding, whose influence on him was total for thirteen years. I, Claudius and Claudius the God appeared in 1934, written to pay for the house, narrating the Julio-Claudian dynasty in the voice of the stammering scholar everyone underestimated, and drawing heavily on Suetonius and Tacitus while cheerfully preferring the better story. The BBC adaptation of 1976 made the period popular for a generation. He always insisted the novels were the trade and the poetry was the work. The White Goddess, his book on poetic myth, is unprovable and has been enormously influential anyway. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford in the 1960s. He translated Suetonius for Penguin himself and knew exactly how thin the evidence for some of his best scenes was. He wrote more than 140 books. The Claudius novels were filmed once before the BBC version, by Josef von Sternberg with Charles Laughton in 1937, and the production collapsed mid-shoot after a car accident.

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