Nowadays Robert Graves is best known for his later and least interesting works on Greek myths and Roman emperors, but at his best, in the first decade of his writing life, as a war poet (Fairies and Fusiliers) and war memoirist (Good-Bye to All That), he was a powerful mythmaker in his own right.He was also borderline absurd, a cut-price Lord Byron whose scandalous private life – in particular the Jazz Age ménage à trois with his wife Nancy Nicholson and a charismatic American literary critic, Laura Riding – somehow overshadowed his literary career.