was T. E. Lawrence, then a Fellow of All Souls', with whom he discussed contemporary poetry and shared in the planning of elaborate pranks. By this time, he had become an atheist. His work was part of the literature event in the art competition at the 1924 Summer Olympics. While still an undergraduate he established a grocers shop on the outskirts of Oxford but the business soon failed. He also failed his BA degree but was exceptionally permitted to take a Bachelor of Letters by dissertation instead, allowing him to pursue a teaching career. In 1926, he took up a post as a Professor of English Literature at Cairo University, accompanied by his wife, their children and the poet Laura Riding, with whom he was having an affair. Graves later claimed that one of his pupils at the university was a young Gamal Abdel Nasser. He returned to London briefly, where he separated from his wife under highly emotional circumstances (and at one point Riding attempted suicide) before leaving to live with Riding in Deià, Majorca. There they continued to publish letterpress books under the rubric of the Seizin Press, founded and edited the literary journal, Epilogue and wrote two successful academic books together: A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928); both had great influence on modern literary criticism, particularly New Criticism. Literary career In 1927, he published Lawrence and the Arabs, a commercially successful biography of T. E. Lawrence. The autobiographical Good-Bye to All That (1929, revised by him and republished in 1957) proved a success but cost him many of his friends, notably Siegfried Sassoon. In 1934, he published his most commercially successful work, I, Claudius. Using classical sources (under the advice of classics scholar Eirlys Roberts) he constructed a complex and compelling tale of the life of the Roman emperor Claudius, a tale extended in the sequel Claudius the God (1935). I, Claudius received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1934. Later, in the 1970s, the Claudius books were turned into the very popular television series I, Claudius, with Sir Derek Jacobi shown in both Britain and United States. Another historical novel by Graves, Count Belisarius (1938), recounts the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius. Graves and Riding left Majorca in 1936 at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and in 1939, they moved to the United States, taking lodging