Graves was, of course, the son of Alfred Perceval Graves, author of Father O'Flynn, who in middle age had married Amy von Ranke, a relative of the great German historian. It was an unlikely alliance, which perhaps goes some way to explain the cross grainedness of Graves's own odd character and his tendency to belong nowhere in particular. His experiences as a young officer in the first WorldWar are described in Goodbye to All That - still a very readable book, though flawed and apparently not reliable factually (Siegfried Sassoon, his companion in arms and fellow poet, was infuriated by it). The famous menage a trois in London with the American poetess Laura Riding and the Irish poet Geoffrey Taylor reads today, in spite of the intense, humourless seriousness of all three, very like a Waugh novel. Earlier, his marriage with the sternly feminist Nancy Nicholson (sister of the painter Ben) had broken up amid much bitterness, although Graves seems to have been happy in his second marriage to the much younger Beryl Pritchard. Graves was a genuine professional writer, an all rounder, turning out books by the baker's dozen - though probably little of his fiction and general writing is read nowadays apart from the Claudius novels. His later poetic fame and personal celebrity in Mallorca did not soften his asperity towards nearly all his contemporaries, particularly since Graves rated his own poetry as high as he correspondingly downgraded theirs. Ego centric, quarrelsome, wildly unobjective, yet not ungenerous, he is not easy to come to grips with and although this biography is fluent and wide ranging, it did not make me yearn to reread the poetry.