"His niece Elizabeth Graves' decorous, naive drawings suit it well."
In this charming, comfortably old-fashioned story, set between the World Wars around a crumbling 600-year-old castle, everyone knows and agrees on the rules; a meanie's attempt to frame a conscientious servant of the king is easily seen through by the authority in charge; and army jam is put in its place.
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"There are some poems more general and less problematical grouped loosely at the end, but nothing comparable in force or ecstatic music."
Graves has grown old, but for him it seems to be a process of intensification and, possibly too, the achievement of an unassailable position.
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"Still, this is largely a fault of style or tone: beneath the magisterial bitchiness lies a very real attachment to art and craft."
Some time ago in The New York Review, Robert Mazzocco wrote that "if it is true Graves won't suffer fools gladly, it is even truer he suffers his betters not at all.
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"Again he is the "passionate, credulous knight...skilled in fight, celebrant of love in a classic, contained lyricism that transcends current partisan concerns.""
First published in London in a limited edition on the author's seventieth birthday, July 24, 1965, these poems also have appeared there in his Collected Poems the lucid 1965.
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We expect anything and everything from Robert Graves, but even so it's a little difficult to think of him addressing the London School of Economics or our own Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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"What he says about love is not particularly new, or even, sometimes, subtle; but the method is pure, polished, exact and often memorable."
This is a small book of 33 new poems, by a cool, careful poet; they are more, Graves says, than he publishes most years and have been unusually hard to write.
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All the laconic scholarship and lightning sharp interpretations and insights which have made Graves' studies of the Greek myths one of the most seductive source books of the decade are here brought to bear with equal effectiveness on the Book of Genesis.
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"Maurice Sendak's delightful pictures add a winning note of gaiety."
A journey into the world of magical spells came about by way of the Big Green Book discovered by Jack on a solitary trip to the attic of his Aunt and Uncle's home.
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"Edward Ardizzone's gentle pictures will help translate the imagery for all."
Children who have not been exposed to the poetry of Robert Graves are in for a delightful and provocative experience in this new book of selected poems for and about children.
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"Directly told, with no attempt to oversimplify them, a good deal of the symbolism and the association with the pattern of ancient Greece survives."
An acknowledged and popular interpreter of the classic days of ancient Greece, Robert Graves has here retold for children 27 of the Greek myths.
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This is a gathering of the latest stories, talks, critical studies and poems by that peripatetic scholar who reached his widest audience with I Claudius.
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"Beautifully printed and bound, informative and accurate, but not at all difficult to read, this is an outstanding reference for students of sociology, anthropology, ancient art, and literature, as well as those interested in mythology."
Richard Aldington and Delano Ames have translated and adapted the original French Encyclopedia with the assistance of experts in each field of mythology—Prehistoric, Egyptian, Assyro-Babylonian, Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Celtic, Teutonic, Slavonic, Finno-Ugric, Ancient Persian, Indian, Chinese, North and South American, Oceanian, and African.
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"But the whole adds up to an unusual reading experience."
Graves has an established reputation as an historical novelist and all his special gifts come into play in an unusually fascinating recreation of the career, trial and education of Palmer, who was known as the mass poisoner.
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"That stratospheric readership which dotes on mythological deities may celebrate this omnium gatherum."
Erudite and iconoclastic Robert Graves' addresses at Yale, Mount Holyoke and Trinity; many essays from The New Yorker, The New Republic, Punch and other periodicals; sallies, stories, and poetry are packaged here.
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"It is a controversial book which however is not apt to be taken seriously by Catholics or Protestants and will serve chiefly to provide faulty ammunition for attacks on the Christian faith."
The provocative thesis of this extensive book of Biblical criticism is that the four canonical Gospels cannot be regarded as a true and historical picture of Jesus, or as an accurate description of his person and his message, since these accounts are overlaid with interpretations of Jesus' life and ministry made by theologians of the early Christian church.
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"For the followers of his tart transgressions into the past."
A re-weaving of Homeric myth reveals the true story of The Return of Odysseus for Nausicaa, Princess of the Elymans, explains how she perpetrated the hoax of this successor to The .
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"As a basic novel influencing later writers much as Hoccaccio, Fielding, Smollett, etc., this would have its primary market literature classes, for libraries and reference."
A new rendering into English of a second century novel is brightly introduced by its translator who not only explains his reasons for re-vamping this classic but also comments on its long history and its reflection of the period and the people.
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"And their number is a substantial one, and might well be increased by this fine novel."
An historical novel, fashioned as only Mr. Graves (of I. Claudius' fame) can fashion one, this is a cleverly balanced mixture of spice, fact, humor and adventure on and off the high seas in the year 1595.
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"A new venture for the author of the Claudius books; a work of creative scholarship."
In investigation — inventive, creative — of classic lore in the story of the voyage of the Argo, and her crew of Argonauts, in quest for the Golden Fleece.
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"This isn't a book for a wide general market, but discriminating readers will find it a real discovery."
There's a strange fascination in this unusual story of the sixteen year old girl who became the wife of the famous poet —it's a holding story despite its deliberately archaic style, for it is told as if recounted by the girl herself in the diary which alone she kept inviolate from her arrogant husband's determination to possess her, body and soul.
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"An interesting approach kept alive by the author's crusading qualities."
Demon investigation of the English language and its use from a survey of its qualities and confusions, and a history of English prose relative to the principles of clear statement.
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Sequel and conclusion to Sergeant Lamb's America, a book which was lost in the fanfare of that other story of the Tory side of the American Revolution, Oliver Wiswell.
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"Thoroughly good reading of the background of those years, if one wants to look back."
Highlighted commentary, bearing resemblance to Frederick Allen's Only Yesterday — details that affected the intimate lives of the British, a graphic panorama of fads, fancies, facts, foibles and fingerposts along the way from war to war.
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"Really straight history, but so told that Lamb's adventures moves along with an authentic feel."
Another of Graves' impressive recreations of history, this time as a representative British soldier sees the War of Independence, Lamb, wild Irishman, involved in a cockfight and drinking bout, finds himself enrolled in the army in '73, and soon thereafter is shipped to Canada.
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"Less colorful than Claudius, but a brilliant piece of scholarship."
A vigorous tale, lacking the completely distinctive qualities of a hero that made Claudius so exceptional, Belisarius retains the same meticulously arranged background and skilful recapturing of a period — the Byzantine empire of the 6th century.
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Entertainingly plotted, though verging on the improbable, and of definite interest to philatelists — a story, sometimes amusing, sometimes involved, of the struggle between brother and sister for possession of a unique stamp.
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"Perhaps it will have a place in bringing new readers to worship at the Dickens' shrine."
If Dickens had not been forced to consider the inhibitions of his day, and if he had not been forced to pad, in order to meet the lineage demands of the periodicals for which he wrote, this is the DAVID COPPERFIELD he would have written.
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"He is after all one of the outstanding colorful, maverick literary figures of our day."
With the "crowning privilege" of the chair of poetry at Oxford bestowed on him in February, Robert Graves appropriately brings out his new collection of his poems.
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"It moves, as does all Mr. Graves' writing, at a brilliant fast pace, and with a tremendous style."
This novel by the author of I, Claudius, Wife to Mr. Milton, etc., is not a religious book, though its theme is the life of the founder of one of the great religious faiths. Mr. Graves writes with an expert hand, and his erudition is undeniable.
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"While Mr. Graves is personal in his views and sometimes arguable in his opinions, the eclectic reader will be interested and stimulated."
Robert Graves recently followed Auden into the Poetry Chair at Oxford, and now we on our side of the Atlantic can be grateful too- for his University lectures, collected here, are delightful reading with a classic felicity. Mr. Graves' prose, though far more involuted than his verse, in elegant and engaging.
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More merchandise from the booming Lawrence of Arabia industry, this is actually a one-volume re-edition of two books publishedmore than 20 years ago.
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