Unreliable witness

Barry Unsworth has an excellent essay at the Guardian about Robert Graves's Claudius books. I must say that I loved, loved, loved those books as a child, I think the peak of my Claudius addiction was at age eleven or so when I read them again and again (I think I had seen some of the Masterpiece Theater television episodes, but it was the voice of the books that really captured my imagination), and throughout my adolescence I was obsessed with Graves and read pretty much everything of his, even the really peculiar ones. (And he featured on an orals topic later in my life, a funny topic on the historical novel that included Anthony Burgess, John Fowles, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal--the last great grad-school gasp of my teenage reading years, that's one way of looking at it. All my other topics were much more suitably British-literature oriented, on the Chaucer-Shakespeare-Milton-Pope-Wordsworth kind of lines.) I, Claudius is really a remarkably good novel, though; pity I have spoiled it for rereading by having already read it about twenty times....

And another Roman-themed one I want to read: Tom Holland praises Robert Harris's new novel Imperium, it sounds wonderfully appealing.