h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have read few better books than Robert Graves’ Claudius novels, and found the BBC adaptation very high quality too (what a cast! Not only Derek Jacobi but also Brian Blessed, Sian Phillips, Patrick Stewart, John Hurt and, err, Christopher Biggins.) I feel compelled to reinforce the faint praise above:

Robert Graves’ Note introducing Claudius the God contains the following response to his critics:

“Some reviewers of I, Claudius, the prefatory volume to Claudius the God, suggested that in writing it I had merely consulted Tacitus’s Annals and suetonius’s Twelve Caesars, run them together, and expanded the results with my own ‘vigorous fancy’. This was not so; nor is it the case here. Among the classical writers who have been borrowed from in the composition of Claudius the God are Tacitus, Dio Cassius, Suetonius, Pliny, Varro, Valerius Maximus, Orosius, Frontinus, Strabo, Caesar, Columella, Plutarch, Josephus, Diodorus Siculus, Photius, Xiphilinus, Zonaras, Seneca, Petronius, Juvenal, Philo, Celsus, the authors of the Acts of the Apostles and of the pseudo-gospels of Nicodemus and St James and Claudius himself in his surviving letters and speeches. Few incidents here given are wholly unsupported by historical authority of some sort or other and I hope none are historically incredible.”

So there!