Lars Porsena

Robert Graves's tongue-in-cheek treatise laments the decline of swearing and foul language in England and looks back with nostalgia at the glory days of oaths and blasphemies. Written when Graves was teaching at Cairo University in 1926, a time when censorship in England was still in full sway, Lars Porsena is an impassioned defence of the foul-mouthed in literature and a resounding raspberry in the face of hypocrisy and puritanism.

'Swearing as an art is at present at low water. National passion seldom runs high, invention is numbed...The only taboo strong enough to be worth breaking is the sexual one.'

________

'A Renaissance figure, among the most generous, self-willed, unseemly and brilliant writers of our century.' The New York Times

________

Read an excerpt from Lars Porsena