Rupert Brooke: life, death and myth

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, aged just 27. 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, including an account of a previously unknown affair of Brooke's, reveals a more conflicted and troubled individual than the gilded Adonis of English literary myth.