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After a time, Geoffrey decided to return to his wife, who was unwilling to join a menage a cinq. Within days of meeting, they were to be found watching a Harold Lloyd film, "with Nancy and Robert each clasping one of Laura's hands as she sat between them in the dark." Complications set in when the triangle was joined by a pale young Irishman called Geoffrey, whose reverence for Laura Riding was only tempered by his inability to perform the required sexual services. She understood her own brilliance, as did Graves, but the rest of the world was left tepid by her ornate mythological poetry and dippy essays. She and Graves shared a vision of the poet as warrior and prophet, sent down to earth to bring wisdom and progress - a scarcely believable notion in our own deconstructive times. When Graves met Riding he was already married to Nancy Nicholson, a feminist artist whose boyish looks offered him a bridge between the homosexual emotions of his youth and adult heterosexuality.

The most significant and searing of the muse's many manifestations was Laura Riding, a powerful, dangerous American poet who was to bring severe disruption to his life. She was that most tricky of literary commodities, the unrecognised genius. Miranda Seymour sees this, convincingly, as a deliberate strategy to ensure his survival at a pitch of creative intensity: "Graves lived as he thought a poet should - on an emotional tightrope." Having made it through the Great War, he felt he had a duty to dedicate himself to poetry under the guidance of his muse, a sort of alternative deity to his stern mother's biblical God. He wrote his brilliant school and war memoir Goodbye to All That at the age of 33 - which seems as good a moment as any to publish your autobiography, before you have had time to become a Tory. Not that Graves ever did succumb, even vaguely, to the lure of convention. His life was a constant rollercoaster of upset, emotion, despair and elation.

Surviving both the prose report and the mass slaughter of the Somme, he thrived for another seven decades, producing a stupendous quantity of poetry, fiction, translation and literary criticism. The death "from wounds" of Robert Graves was announced in the Times in the summer of 1916. Lace curtains, scones, souvenir tea-towels from Aberystwyth, smatterings of the Welsh language, pipe-smoking chapel deacons and a reverence for dead educationalists - all these cultural mementos are reminders that out there on the very fringe of the British Raj, there was once a sub-Empire of the Welsh.Mr Jenkins has aimed his book directly at a Welsh audience, making no allowance for English ignorance This seems to me a pity. There is nothing parochial about the story he tells: it is the allegorical tale of two small strong peoples, coming together from the ends of the earth, to find themselves curiously in sympathy.. The national anthem of the Khasis is a local adaptation of "Land of my Fathers", and when the Mazo sub-tribe recently rebelled against Indian rule, it did so on St David's Day. Presbyterianism thrives there still, and expresses itself often in heartfelt renderings of old Welsh hymn-tunes.

The anniversary of Thomas Jones's death was commemorated by a quarter of a million celebrants - more than had lately turned out to greet the Pope. made us what we are", cried one Khasi lady to Jenkins, "they gave us everything..."The Welsh legacy is far from dead in the Khasi hills. The Welsh started hundreds of schools, too, introduced female education and ran the best hospitals in north-eastern India "The Welsh... When the Rev Thomas Jones devised an alphabet for the hitherto unwritten Khasi language, and translated the Bible into it, he was laying the first foundations of a Khasi literature, and probably rescuing the tongue from extinction. The Welsh themselves, determined as they were to wean the Khasis from their paganism, were seen by some as oppressors, but in general they seem to have been a popular success.For they were the saviours of the Khasi culture. They cherished profound ancestral traditions, they lived in rugged mountain country, they went in for megaliths, cromlechs, poetry and choral singing, and their way of life was constantly threatened by the outside forces of India and the British Empire. Gradually her affair with George became as a candle to the sun of the emotions she began to experience.''When Lovell talks of Digby making a visit to England late in life and being once more amongst ''people of her own kind'', she is surely begging the very question that makes Digby so intriguing: what was ''her own kind''? A Scandalous Life is too narrow to provide an answer; and yet having said all of this, the subject is so tremendous that Lovell's work does seem to be worth reading.