Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth

A revised edition of the candid, sometimes shocking, biography of Rupert Brooke revealing the very different reality behind the golden-boy façade of an English literary icon

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 bisexual, 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.


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Nigel Jones is an author, a former editor at History Today and BBC history magazines, and has been a TV and radio broadcaster. He is the author of several histories and biographies, including 'The War Walk: A Journey along the Western Front', 'Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth' and 'Sir Oswald Mosley'.