Paragon of youthful beauty, romantic symbol of a lost England, and precociously gifted poet, Rupert Chawner Brooke died in a hospital ship off the Aegean island of Skyros in April 1915. The 27-year-old author of the patriotic sonnet 'The Soldier' was buried in a grave strewn with olive branches and scented with sage. All England mourned his passing.
But behind the glow of myth lies a darker reality. At the height of his promise a disappointment in love triggered a mental and physical collapse that brought his inner complexities to the surface. Letters reveal a man who was sexually ambivalent, misogynistic, anti-Semitic - and sometimes alarmingly unstable.
This revised edition of Nigel Jones's admired biography, with a new chapter on a previously unknown affair of Brooke's, reveals a more conflicted and troubled individual than the gilded Adonis of English literary myth.
