John carey

One of the most revealing moments in Sunday Best — a collection of book reviews dating back to the late 1980s — comes when John Carey, invited to appraise some items about Robert Graves, remembers hobnobbing with the author of I, Claudius half a century ago in Oxford’s High Street. Instantly, two of Carey’s signature marks — his love of literature and his eye for personality — come crashing together. Graves, then in his late seventies, tall, craggy and mage-like, is still a “commanding sight.” The drawback is his conversation: from the great poet’s lips, “in disconcertingly loud, upper-class tones, issued a bizarre stream of superstition and bogus history.