Forever England: The Life of Rupert Brooke - Softcover

Read, Mike

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1849548013 ISBN 13: 9781849548014

Publisher: Biteback

Synopsis

Good-looking, charming and gifted, Rupert Brooke is the tragic embodiment of the generation lost between 1914 and 1918. His romantic war poetry stands in striking contrast to the work of more disillusioned contemporaries such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. But as this searching biography makes clear, his private letters reveal a far more troubled and misunderstood man, caught in a tangled web of secret affairs and mental instability.

About this title

About the Author:

As a radio host, songwriter, journalist and television presenter, Mike Read's career has spanned many decades and vocations. His stints at the helm of iconic shows such as Top of the Pops and The Radio One Breakfast Show, as well as collaborations with the greats of media, music, and broadcasting, have cemented his status as a household name for over thirty years. With a plethora of shows, musicals and books to his name, Mike continues to delight audiences with daily radio programmes for the BBC and Magic, and a regular reviewer slot on Sky News. He lives in Henley, Oxfordshire.

From Publishers Weekly:

"I am twenty-six years old [today]," Brooke wrote to a girlfriend, "And I've done so little." It was August 3, 1913, a year and a day before England would enter WWI. A young Apollo to his generation, Brooke would have only one more birthday, dying of septicemia en route to Gallipoli. His Byronic personality and looks, and his early death, gave his thin literary achievement a sentimental appeal that overshadowed that of more substantial wartime poets. Read's 22nd book (he is also an English broadcaster and composer) cannot replace Christopher Hassell's 1964 life, the standard work before it went out of print. Read exposes a brief Tahitian romance that resulted in an unacknowledged child, but otherwise this biography is inadequately researched, repetitious and padded with local history and irrelevant asides. Its wooden prose includes such sentences as this: "He eventually would live there, but that was in the future." Seventy-one of Brooke's poems appear, mostly in full; among them is the famous "The Solider," which prophesies his burial in "some corner of a foreign field"Ait would be the Greek island of SkyrosAthat would become "forever England." Illustrations.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Biteback
• ISBN 10: 1849548013
• ISBN 13: 9781849548014
• Binding: Paperback