In two minds | 16 August 2018

‘I have a very poor opinion of other people’s opinion of me — though I am fairly happy in my own conceit — and always surprised to find that anyone likes my work or character.’ This admission by Robert Graves — made to his then friend Siegfried Sassoon in the mid-1920s — goes to the heart of his character as a man and a poet. It projects a powerful mixture of defiance and neediness, which in his personal life produced a series of highly disruptive assertions and reversals, and in his writing life an equally striking set of commitments and walkings-back.

Jean Moorcroft Wilson, who has previously published fluent biographies of Sassoon and Edward Thomas, is a reliable guide to all these contortions. Her book tells only the first half of Graves’s story, but adds a valuable degree of detail to the several existing biographies and, thanks to the sympathy it shows for all aspects of Graves’s character, is consistently illuminating.