Book description
Robert Graves first came across the name of Roger Lamb in 1914, when
Graves was an English officer instructing his platoon in regimental
history. Lamb was a British soldier who had served his king during the
American War of Independence, and whose claim to a footnote in history
is that he managed to escape twice from American prison camps. When
Graves went to America in the 1930s, he remembered Sergeant Lamb,
investigated his story and created this fictionalized memoir telling
Lamb's story from his Irish childhood to war and revolution, weaving a
mesmerizing tale of courage and adventure. Robert Graves was a poet,
professor, and the author of
Goodbye to All That
(1929), a landmark anti-heroic memoir of life in the trenches during
World War I. He is even better known for his historical novels about the
Roman emperor Claudius: I, Claudius
(1934) and Claudius the God
(1935). Despite those successes, Graves was primarily a poet: he
published dozens of volumes of his verse during his life, and was
professor of poetry at Oxford from 1961-66. Graves lived most of his
adult life on the island of Majorca, at first with fellow poet Laura
Riding, and later with his second wife Beryl Hodge.
