Ebook: 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 updated, revised edition of Nigel Jones's admired biography includes an account of a love affair that had lain buried for eighty-five years after Brooke's death, and a new Appendix on the last, mysterious hours of Ka Cox, with whom the poet had his longest and most tortured relationship. It reveals a Brooke for the twenty-first century, a surprisingly modern man who was conflicted, confused and troubled, but who was also the quintessential star of the Edwardian idyll so brutally snuffed out in 1914"--Jacket.