“... of Bloomsbury, and of Vita in particular, but his shotgun method reached many others, including Robert Graves and Laura Riding, J.C. Squire, and London literary politics in general. Some of the lines are funny, even witty, but more often the abuse is heavy, repetitious and sprawling: when Campbell was hating, he didn’t know when to stop. Still, the ...”

“... when the hapless consort’s hairline started to recede or his ardour flag. This is the version Robert Graves gives in his Greek Myths, and though Graves’s anthropology is just as shaky as J.G. Frazer’s, I love the poetic truth at the kernel of it. Certainly the question ‘Who is your father?’ only becomes ...”

“... it for thirty years and who thought he was worth an OM. Among his friends were T.E. Lawrence and Robert Graves. He had the patriarchal scholar’s satisfaction of receiving a festschrift, organised by Sir Michael Howard, but never achieved the university distinction his attainments probably merited. When in 1946 Swinton at last relinquished what Danchev ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”