A 'must read' for any fan of Graves and well worthwhile for anyone who doesn't yet know his work. The range of place, tone and atmosphere is very wide indeed. The ancient Rome section is quite different from the rest, not being drawn from his personal life and milieu, but appears (to this non-specialist) to capture and deliver a flavour of 'how it might have been'. ( )

This collection of stories are said, by Robert Graves, to have all actually happened to him or someone he knows (except of course the tales of ancient times). My favorite ones were at the beginning of the book about events and people he had known. They remind me a bit of Paul Auster's stories in "The Red Notebook" because of the tinge of the uncanny. The stories about ancient Rome were the least interesting, and his stories about his time in Mallorca were amusing.
Content:
English stories: The Shout, Old Papa Johnson, Treacle Tart, The Full Length, Earth to Earth, Period Piece, Week-End at Cwm Tatws, He Went Out to Buy a Rhine, Kill Them! Kill Them!, The French Thing, A Man May Not Marry His..., An Appointment for Candlemas, The Abominable Mr. Gunn, Harold Vesey at the Gates of Hell, Christmas Truce, You Win, Houdini!
Roman Stories: Epics Are Out of Fashion, The Tenement: A Vision of Imperial Rome, The Myconian
Majorcan Stories: They Say...They Say, 6 Valiant Bulls 6, A Bicycle in Majorca, The Five Godfathers, Evidence of Affluence, God Grant Your Honour Many Years, The Viscountess and the Short-Haired Girl, A Toast to Ava Gardner, The Lost Chinese, She Landed Yesterday, The Whitaker Negroes ( )

This is a really good selection of short stories. There about 30 of them in this volume, across around 300 pages, and they come in three categories: English stories, Roman stories, and Majorcan stories. The English stories make up about half of the book, and were my favourites; they reminded me very much of the "Tales of the Unexpected". There are only 4 Roman stories, and these have quite a different feel than the English ones. Graves was an historian, and the atmosphere of the classical Roman age seems well recreated and convincing, though I am not able to say how accurate it is as I am not an historian myself. Graves also spent a while living in Majorca, and his stories set there also have quite a distinct atmosphere to them.
Curiously, somewhere in the preface, he claims that all these stories were either based on events that happened to him, or were related to him as true from other sources, but I cannot credit this. The stories are mostly brilliant, but I do not believe that most of them happened. Perhaps I live a boring life compared to that of Graves, but a lot of the happenings related here just seem too curious to be true. Read individually, they each seem more or less believable, at a stretch, but compiled together they ask too much of the imagination to take the authors word as fact. This in no way makes the book any less enjoyable, and in not knowing whether or not they are true, there is the added enjoyment of mystery. If Graves made them up, then he is a first rate story teller, if they are true, then the world is a stranger place than I thought it was. ( )