US actor Chris Pratt poses during a red carpet event to promote his new film Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3 in Seoul on April 19, 2023 But it’s worth it for Haddock alone, who’s so good as Nancy you almost end up longing for a film about her instead. Dianna Agron feels underpowered as Riding while, for a film with sex at its heart, The Laureate feels, er… not particularly sexy. It’s a compelling story, and decently told by writer-director William Nunez.

Before you can say ‘love triangle’, all of them are off to London for more decadence and debauchery. No sooner has Laura cast a covetous eye at the handsome Graves – played here by Tom Hughes – than she’s begun a flirtation with Nancy (Laura Haddock) too. She declines, which is probably just as well, as the ambitious writer and poet is already causing chaos in the Oxford cottage where Graves, still suffering from bouts of shell shock, and his wife, the painter and pioneering feminist, Nancy Nicholson, have invited her to stay. S., I’m not sure which – makes a clumsy pass at his pretty new American lodger, Laura Riding. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) and the poet, T. Here we see he was close enough to his fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon to call him ‘Sass’, while his inner circle numbered both T. At its emotional heart is Robert Graves, the celebrated First Word War poet who would go on to write I, Claudius. The Laureate is exactly that sort of picture. You know, the type of film where someone might casually say: ‘Ah, Lord Byron, have you met Shelley and his wife, Mary?’ Call me superficial but I normally love the sort of historical film where even the incidental characters turn out to be famous.

I claudius by robert graves