Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth

"Rupert Brooke, isn't it a romantic name?" wrote Lytton Strachey to Virginia Woolf, after first meeting the man who became the "star" of an exceptionally brilliant generation. But behind the facade of the stunning looks and the golden-boy image a very different Brooke was concealed that was far from romantic - and is now revealed in this utterly candid biography. After cutting a swathe through his contemporaries at Rugby and Cambridge, Brooke became the central figure in two distinct coteries - the homosexual Cambridge secret society "the Apostles" and the "Neo-Pagans", a group of free-thinking young people sworn to a carefree outdoor life of gypsy camps, nude swimming and the great outdoors. This compartmentalism was typical of Brooke - addicted to secrecy, he was loved by both men and women, and was himself highly sexually ambivalent. His boyish charm bowled over (almost) all those who met him - including the contemporary great and good like Asquith, Churchill, H.G. Wells and Henry James. But the surface self-confidence and the effortless literary and social success hid a darker Brooke - revealed in this book. At the height of his promise, a seemingly trivial setback in love propelled Brooke into a complete mental and physical collapse, which stripped him of his defences and brought his inner complexes seething to the surface.