Promotional Information

This new revelatory biography of Robert Graves re-examines his position as a major First World War poet, as well as a master prose writer

About the Author

Jean Moorcroft Wilson is a celebrated biographer and expert on the First World War Poets whose previous subjects include Isaac Rosenberg (on whom she lectures worldwide), Siegfried Sassoon, Edward Thomas and Virginia Woolf.

Reviews

Commanding ... To encounter [Graves] in these pages is to feel something of the relentlessly explosive energy with which he lived the first half of his life. Wilson lands him like a Zeppelin bomb.
*Observer*

Jean Moorcroft Wilson has built an unassailable reputation as our leading authority on the poets of the Great War ... Combining intelligent and perceptive criticism of his work, with revealing insights into the man, this study of the devastating impact of the conflict on Graves makes for compelling reading. I cannot recommend it too highly
*author of Rupert Brooke: Life, Death & Myth*

Diligent and insightful ... Jean Moorcroft Wilson teases the truth from Graves’s exaggerations, mis-rememberings and downright gibs ... She is by turns compassionate and caustic and is clear sighted … [Her] close reading of the war poems is illuminating.
*The Times*

Wilson unveils the poet behind the man struggling to make, not write, poetry [and] clarifies our understanding of what Graves was about
*Literary Review*

Consistently illuminating
*Spectator*

A sensitive rendering of the poet’s formative years ... finely nuanced
*Kirkus Reviews*

A fine attempt to give Graves his due in the context of the Great War
*Evening Standard*

This is an exemplary biography and a terrific entertainment … Wilson brings this difficult, unlovable but strangely impressive man yelpingly to life
*Sunday Times*

Readable and absorbing
*TLS*

Deft and commanding ... On a par with her other outstanding biographies
*BBC History Magazine*

25 years after the last biography, a fresh approach … Measured and dispassionate … This is biography at its best
*Country Life*

A sensitive rendering of the poet's formative years … A sympathetic perspective on Graves' eventful life.
*Kirkus Reviews*

A well-researched, readable biography
*Library Journal*

Anyone reading this book will come away with a fresh, and deeper, understanding of Graves and his writing – even if they have read previous biographies […] There is no doubt that in many ways Jean Moorcroft Wilson has outdone her predecessors.
*PN Review*