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'Count Belisarius' tells of the last of the great generals of the Roman Empire, who reconquered Africa and Italy, only to be rewarded with suspicion and humiliation. 'Lawrence and the Arabs' tells the story of the Arab revolt and Lawrence's place in it. In both tales, Graves explores the nature of heroism in a world grown wary of heroes.
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The Story of Marie Powell, Wife to Mr Milton and The Islands of Wisdom edited by Simon Brittan In The story of Marie Powell, Wife to Mr. Milton (1943) Robert Graves - half a century before Carol Ann Duffy - creates a Mrs for a famous Mr, a Mr who Graves regards as one of the heinous monsters in the English poetic pantheon. Certainly his Mrs Milton is ill-used by a distended genius. Milton's first wife was sixteen when they married. Milton was after her dowry and when it did not follow he proved a domineering and prig, unresponsive to her sensuousness or her down-to-earth wit. It was a spiritual misalliance, too: her Catholicism sorted ill with his beliefs. The dramatic political and military events of the English civil war touch her life at every point, and we witness the execution of Charles I close up. The depiction of everyday life at the time and the merciless portrait of the young Milton, are spell-binding. The Islands of Unwisdom (1949) is also a true story, but visits a different, very Catholic world, that of the expeditions of the Spanish explorers and discoverers, near contemporaries of Milton but not emancipated by the Reformation, who come unstuck in the New World. Graves reconstructs the ill-fated voyage of Alvaro de Mendana y Neya to find the Solomon Islands, popularly believed to constitute the fabled Land of Ophir, where King Solomon got his legendary wealth. With Don Alvaro sails his wife Ysabel, a key figure in the narrative.
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• I Claudius - Claudius the God.

In May 2005 Penguin will publish 70 unique titles to celebrate the company's 70th birthday. The titles in the Pocket Penguins series are emblematic of the renowned breadth and quality of the Penguin list and will hark back to Penguin founder Allen Lane's vision of 'good books for all'. Published by Penguin for more than sixty years, the author and scholar Robert Graves wrote two of the greatest historical novels of the twentieth century: I Claudius and Claudius the God. Written as Claudius' autobiography, they follow his progress from a stammering figure of fun to the ruler of the Roman Empire. Here, he describes the glory and decadence of the mad Emperor Caligula's reign - an age of wild debauchery and whimsical cruelty.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

The Story of Marie Powell, Wife to Mr Milton and The Islands of Wisdom edited by Simon Brittan In The story of Marie Powell, Wife to Mr. Milton (1943) Robert Graves - half a century before Carol Ann Duffy - creates a Mrs for a famous Mr, a Mr who Graves regards as one of the heinous monsters in the English poetic pantheon. Certainly his Mrs Milton is ill-used by a distended genius. Milton's first wife was sixteen when they married. Milton was after her dowry and when it did not follow he proved a domineering and prig, unresponsive to her sensuousness or her down-to-earth wit. It was a spiritual misalliance, too: her Catholicism sorted ill with his beliefs. The dramatic political and military events of the English civil war touch her life at every point, and we witness the execution of Charles I close up. The depiction of everyday life at the time and the merciless portrait of the young Milton, are spell-binding. The Islands of Unwisdom (1949) is also a true story, but visits a different, very Catholic world, that of the expeditions of the Spanish explorers and discoverers, near contemporaries of Milton but not emancipated by the Reformation, who come unstuck in the New World. Graves reconstructs the ill-fated voyage of Alvaro de Mendana y Neya to find the Solomon Islands, popularly believed to constitute the fabled Land of Ophir, where King Solomon got his legendary wealth. With Don Alvaro sails his wife Ysabel, a key figure in the narrative.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Good-bye to all that
• Postscript to Good-bye to all that
• But it still goes on : a play in three acts.

"Goodbye to All That" is Robert Graves' celebrated account of his youth and his experiences as a young officer during the First World War. From an unhappy childhood at Charterhouse to the horrors of the trenches, this is both a movingly personal portrait and an invaluable chronicle of an age. This is the only available edition of Robert Graves' original 1929 version, differing considerably from the 1957 revision offered by other publishers. Also included are Graves' "Postscript to Goodbye to All That" (1930) and the play "But it Still Goes On" (1930), both of which have been out of print for decades. Steven Trout's Introduction and notes are invaluable to new readers and enthusiasts.
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• King Jesus My Head! My Head!.
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This volume brings together two historical novels based upon the Bible. "King Jesus" is a daring rewriting of the Gospels in the light of Graves's speculations in history and mythology. His Jesus is a charismatic religious reformer dedicated to the ethical and spiritual principles of an austere Judaism and firmly opposed to the legalism of the Temple authorities, the oppressions of imperial Rome and the allure of an older matriarchal goddess cult subtly subverting his ministry. Graves's daring rewriting of the Gospels portrays Jesus as fully human, yet marked with sacred royalty, bent upon a doomed confrontation with external enemies and internal doubts that lead to a conclusion at once inevitable and unexpected. Written in 1925, "My Head! My Head!" was Robert Graves's first novel - a retelling of the story of Elisha and the Shunamite woman. He amplifies the brief Old Testament story into a series of dramatic encounters between the wandering prophet and his inquisitive, quick-witted hostess, who, by skilful questioning, prizes from Elisha the secret religious history of ancient Israel and the true story of the patriarch Moses. Graves uses the extended dialogue of Elisha and Jochebed to elaborate his own unorthodox theory of the origins of primitive Judaism and the role of Moses in the eventual triumph of the cult of Jahweh over the other desert religions of the time.
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The life of Sergeant Roger Lamb, a young Dubliner who had served the Royal Welsh Fusiliers during the American War of Independence was the subject of a novelistic enterprise originally published in two parts because of war time paper shortages. The final result is a pair of picaresque novels concerned with the passions and frustrations of a distant war which mirrored many of Graves' own feelings for World War II which was happening around him. As an account of the struggle for independence, the horrors and excitements of war, the two novels were well reviewed and popular when published in the early 1940s. This chance to have both parts of what Graves considered to be a single project in one volume offers the opportunity of access to a literary and historical creation which both opens up the world of the American War of Independence, and the creative life and mind of a great writer of the 20th century.
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This text re-edits "I Claudius" and "Claudius the God" as part of the 21-volume Robert Graves Programme.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

The Nazarene Gospels Restored is Robert Graves's major work on the life of Jesus, written in collaboration with the distinguished Hebrew scholar Joshua Podro. The research and writing occupied them for over five years, in a working relationship compounded, in John W. Presley's phrase, 'of argument, scholarship and mutual respect', in which the imaginative writer and the Hebraist drew on their vast knowledge of the ancient world to reveal an extraordinary new, 'true' story of Jesus. The result is, as Graves wrote to T.S. Eliot, 'a very long, very readable, very strange book', and one that Presley argues is as central to Graves's writing as The White Goddess. The Nazarene Gospels Restored was controversial when first published: the Church Times refused to advertise it, reviews were hostile, and Graves twice sued for libel. In the twenty-first century it is possible to read it in the contextof a continuing engagement with the historical Jesus, both scholarly and popular - nothing in The Da Vinci Code, Presley notes, would have surprised Graves or Podro. In this new edition, John W. Presley gives a detailed account of the composition and reception of the book, setting it in the context of Graves's writing and of biblical scholarship. An appendix of Graves's Foreword and annotations for a projecte drevised edition make this an indispensable resource.
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We don't know who, or even if, Homer was. Given threads of internal evidence in the "Odyssey", Robert Graves invents, or discovers, that the author of the poem was a woman, herself part of the epic action. He chooses the beguiling, clear-headed Nausicaa and re-visions the post-Trojan world through her eyes. This is the theme of "Homer's Daughter", one of Graves's most daring fictional acts. The "Odyssey" has been described as a "woman's epic", full of female characters and different in kind and colour from the "Illiad" with its tight focus, its largely male world, Graves's Nausicaa is brilliant at telling dramatic aplomb. The confrontations in the Council and between Aethon and the suitors are memorably evoked. Nausicaa is a princess of mixed Greek and other ancestry, combining in herself the various cultures that inform the language and folklore of the epic. Graves makes it possible for us to believe that the author told her own story, a true one, buried within the Homeric epic. There is adventure and intrigue; the book stands near the beginning of a tradition that includes Leonardo Sciascia's "The Council of Eqypt" and Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose". "Homer's Daughter" is reprinted here with Graves's ambitious Trojan novel "The Anger of Achilles", which culminates in the death of Hector, emblem of the doom of Troy itself.
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This is a collection of Robert Graves' essays, written between 1922 and 1972, on areas of culture which engaged him. They are organized around the thematic categories of literature, history and religion. The collection chronicles Graves' intellectual development by presenting the essays chronologically to show how ideas begin and evolve over half a century. At the same time, the essays demonstrate his eclectic knowledge over a vast range of topics and confirm not only his insights, but also his humour and famous "leaps of logic".
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Graves's text has been fully corrected and revised in this volume as part of the "Robert Graves Programme". The book describes the dynamic of Graves's creative imagination. Grevel Lindop restores to the text its proper order and adds introductory material, as well as notes. This edition should lead to a re-evaluation of Graves's entire oeuvre.
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This text is part of the "Robert Graves Programme" in which his work is re-edited and re-published. In 1918, Robert Graves began his writing career in earnest. The phases of his critical writing are distinct. From his 1925 volume "Poetic Unreason and Other Studies" to his collaborative works with Laura Riding, to "The Common Asphodel" (1949) and other work, Graves concerns and discoveries are controversial. Through the anti-Romantic years and into the decades of irony, he maintained and defended the lyric tradition. As advocate, polemicist and mythographer, his writing can serve as an example for those seeking the traditional and classical writing.
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Graves's poems have been re-edited in this volume as part of the "Robert Graves Programme". The text restores hundreds of poems that Graves omitted from the canon or overlooked in his continual refinements and, with its scholarly apparatus, should lead to a re-evaluation of his poetic oeuvre.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Beginning his life-long affair with the Middle East, T.E. Lawrence--Lawrence of Arabia--made his first journey to the region, a four-month walking tour of Syria studying the Crusaders' castles, while still a student at Oxford. He later returned to the area as an archeologist and at the outbreak of World War I was attached to British army intelligence in Egypt. In 1916 he set out on his greatest adventure. With no backing, Lawrence joined Arab forces facing almost insurmountable odds in a rebellion against Turkish domination. His brilliance as a desert war strategist made him a hero among the Arabs, a legendary figure throughout the world, and earned him the moniker Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence, though, had a near-pathological dislike of publicity and, at the writing of this book, had begun a life of self-imposed obscurity as T.E. Shaw, an anonymous soldier in the RAF. First published in 1927, Robert Graves's biography remains a unique study of T.E. Lawrence. As a close friend (Lawrence had earlier saved the aspiring poet from bankruptcy), Graves was the only biographer to write with Lawrence's permission and cooperation and did so with understanding and insight that enabled him to separate the man from the myth