Author:Robert Graves
Graves described poetry as his ruling passion, and for him love was 'the main theme and origin of true poems'. He created a rich mythology where love, fear, fantasy and the supernatural play an essential role. Intimate yet universal, passionate yet precise, their brilliant alchemy of realism and magic made Graves's poems some of the finest of the last century. In this edition the poems appear without critical apparatus or commentary. The volume represents in its purest form the achievement of Graves's seventy productive years.
Weir’s sympathetic and detailed biography reassesses the life of a woman whose role in public life…has been underrated by historians
—— New StatesmanThe finest historical novel ever written by an American
—— Washington PostIt would be easy to over-praise this novel; but there does not seem any adequate reason why this temptation should be resisted
—— EconomistA novel of extraordinary range, yet of extraordinary minuteness, that manages never to sacrifice one quality for the other
—— Financial TimesWilliams has fashioned an always engaging, psychologically convincing work of fiction - a consistent and well-realized portrait
—— New YorkerA highly imaginative account of the life and times of Augustus-a brilliant novel
—— Library JournalA brilliant epistolary novel about Octavius Caesar and ancient Rome...all three [of John Williams'] novels show a similar narrative arc: a young man's initiation, vicious male rivalries, subtler tensions between men and women, fathers and daughters, and finally a bleak sense of disappointment, even futility.
—— New York TimesExquisite...brims with great lines
—— Chicago TribuneA vividly imagined re-creation of classical Rome, but its intuitive grasp of the experience of immense power makes it an unusual, and superior, novel
—— Boston GlobeThere could be no better year than 2014 to rediscover this one
—— Mary Beard , Times Literary Supplement