Robert Graves' best-known work is his novel I, Claudius (1934). It is told through the eyes of the Roman emperor and is considered to be not just educational but a fast-paced, fun read. Graves followed his story with a sequel, Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina.

The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien, is a highly biographical 1990 novel about the Vietnam War, with anecdotes about war's insanity that match those that Graves discussed decades earlier.

Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) is a classic of British literature, and, though out of print in America, still is available through many libraries. Sassoon offers a different perspective on life in the first battalion than what Graves describes.

A Selection of the Poems of Laura Riding, edited by scholar Robert Nye, offers the best that Riding produced in her long lifetime and...