The third son of Robert Graves by his second wife, Beryl, William Graves was five years old when he was taken with his parents to Majorca, where his father had lived with Laura Riding back in the 1930s. This was 1944, when the Spanish Civil War was a recent memory, and something which people spoke about with reluctance. Graves, eccentric and ultra English, was quite at home in village life and so were his children, but they had little money to spare until the poet started making lecture tours in the US which brought in extra funds and caused his reputation to rise again. William married, became a geologist, and after his father's death discovered that he had been named as his executor although for years they had got on badly.

Nostalgic but by no means uncritical, this book should interest others besides admirers of Graves's poetry.