In writing a life, the biographer lives with two questions: Why does this person matter to the world? And, why does this person matter to me? In April 1915, a hundred years before this book, Rupert Brooke was probably more admired and more widely read than any other young Englishman. W.B. Yeats had called him “the handsomest man in England.” Beauty might be dismissed as merely the luck of birth, but it added another dimension to the soldier-poet – the quality of glamour. Not only that, but the fatal glamour of the hero who sacrifices himself for the lesser beings...

The child may be father to the man, but most of the time the child’s inner life is beyond a biographer’s reach. We know the social class and the institution that Rupert Brooke was born into; we know something of his parents and their rather odd marriage. Rupert wrote letters and school exercises from an early age, but he was writing to satisfy someone else’s requirements. For his whole life he would write compulsively yet hardly ever, it seems, straight from the heart. Like an actor, he would put on a mask – many masks – to hide his true...

Rupert Brooke went up to King’s College to read classics because his father had done the same, because his uncle Alan Brooke was dean of the college, and because he had won a scholarship. Until a few years before, King’s had been a college exclusively for Etonians, and it still kept an atmosphere of aristocratic leisure. But within a few days of his arrival at King’s in October 1906, Rupert became friends with two young men who came from a different mould. Justin Brooke (no relation) was at Emmanuel College and sharing lodgings with a fellow student there, Jacques Raverat....

Rupert’s vocation in life was as a writer and scholar. But his second great passion was for politics. That he was a committed man of the left did not fit comfortably with the legend that grew up after his death. A young hero who hated the upper classes could not be a hero for everybody, so it was best to keep quiet about his partisan activities. Also, the upper classes did not hate him; rather, they were making him one of their pets during the last two or three years of his life. One is left wondering how Rupert would...

At Andermatt, Christmas 1907, Brynhild Olivier had introduced Rupert to the pleasures of flirting with a woman. Before that his only objects of desire had been boys, and “giggling females” were to be avoided if possible.¹ For the remaining seven years of his life, Rupert was almost always in love or in lust with a woman, sometimes with several at once. Yet what happened to him at Andermatt was not a classic conversion experience, where someone discards an old self and is reborn as an entirely different person. Rupert continued to feel desire for men, and to respond when they...

As Rupert digested his mediocre exam results, he had a retreat already planned at Grantchester, three miles upstream on the Cam. He claimed that he left Cambridge because he was “passionately enamoured of solitude.”¹ But anyone who really wanted to be a hermit should not choose a picturesque spot within an hour’s stroll from scores of acquaintances. Before he moved there in June 1909, Grantchester was already one of Rupert’s favourite places, for tea in the famous orchard or bathing in Byron’s Pool, a secluded stretch of the river a few hundred yards from the village. Nor could he really...

On the way back from Lenzerheide, Rupert fell ill with inflammation of his mouth and throat. He blamed it on some bad honey he had eaten in Basel. Soon after he had to deal with something more serious – the collapse of Parker Brooke’s health. “He has been unable to see more than men as trees walking,” Rupert told Dudley Ward. “He’s a very pessimistic man, given to brooding, and without much inside to fall back on – in the way of thought. It has been bad to see him tottering about the House, or sitting thinking and brooding over...

During 1910 several young men in Rupert’s circle were becoming frustrated and impatient. How long could the young women they loved go on hinting that they would embrace sensuality some day – but not yet? Either their love had to be followed through to its logical consummation or they would pursue sex outside the group, as Rupert had already done surreptitiously with Denham Russell-Smith.

Towards the end of June, Jacques Raverat went walking with Ka Cox in the Lake District. Somewhere near Ullswater, love, as he put it, sat down between them like a “rude, unbidden guest.” In fact, this...

What might be called a collective affair between Bloomsbury and the Neo-pagans began near the end of January 1911, when Virginia Stephen (soon Woolf) met Ka Cox at Bertrand Russell’s house near Oxford. Like many individual affairs, this one started in excitement and mutual admiration; began to conflict with rival commitments after a few months; and ended a year or so later in crisis and a good measure of rudeness and dislike. Later some friendship survived, and after both sides had suffered their share of death and disaster the affair reached its final stage: nostalgia. But why should relations between...

Rupert’s break with Noel on 15 December was not just a predictable failure of first love. For three and a half years he had set his emotional compass by Noel’s standard of female purity and self-control. As Ka stepped in to take her place, the polarity of Rupert’s desire was reversed. Now he had to exert restraint on the frightening aggressiveness of female desire. His sonnet “The Descent” blames Ka for having pulled him down into the underworld of sex:

Because you called, I left the mountain height, … And from my radiant uplands chose the blind Nooks of your...

On the night of 30 January 1912, Rupert and Ka both set off by train. In the morning they would meet at Verona, halfway between Cannes and Munich. Rupert had set his heart on meeting in Italy. From Verona, he fantasised, they might slip away to Venice and be lost to the world for months. But, when they met, it was more as patient and nurse than as lovers. Ka realised at once that Rupert was too weak to travel. She took him back to Munich the next day and installed him in the same rooms he had in Schwabing...

For two weeks Rupert waited for Ka at a Pension in Berlin. While there he received a letter from Noel (now lost) that asked him to apply some judgment and moderation to his relations with Ka. That was not how he had seen it, during the week of crisis in April. “Either I won,” he told Noel (that is, made Ka completely submissive to him), “or I lost and killed everybody.” That was why he needed a revolver, which he now had acquired in Berlin. And he needed the psychological hardness to go with it:

You see, it’s no good...

“I was once in love with 3 people,” Rupert said later, about the events of 1912, “and that wasn’t all jam.”¹ It wasn’t all jam for others, either. Rupert’s vacillations between Ka, Noel, and Bryn broke the easy companionship that the Neo-pagans had once shared. No one had the heart to make a summer camp in 1912, nor would they ever assemble again with Rupert at their head. After five years, most of them wanted to reduce their stakes in the group. Several now believed in marriage more than in friendship; all had seen too much grief within their circle...

Rupert sailed from Liverpool on the rmsCedricon 22 May 1913. She was a relatively slow ship, taking nine days to get to New York. There were more than two thousand emigrants below in steerage but Rupert, in first class, had nothing to say about them. His main concern, as the ship plowed on at sixteen knots, was to make firm his relationship with Cathleen.¹ That forced him to say more about what had happened with Ka a year earlier, and about his resolution to make a clean break with her:

It’s bitter destroying and breaking things two have...

When thePhiladelphiadocked at Plymouth on 25 June 1914, Rupert was twenty-six years old and eager to return to English life. But what sort of life? For a young man in his position it should include a place to live, a job, a set of old friends, and a suitable woman to marry. In a year or two, he could put down roots, making the transition from wanderer to householder, from uncertain youth to an established man. The war would cut across his course, but without that intervention from history Rupert would still have had great difficulty in finding...

Rupert met his fate in the Gallipoli expedition, which was Churchill’s war and the worst of his many strategic blunders. He conceived an attack on the Dardanelles as a giant flanking movement around the Western Front. It also had the attraction of giving a central role to the forces he controlled personally: the Navy and the Royal Naval Division (rnd). Asquith was guilty of egging him on. A few days after Antwerp had surrendered, he suggested to Churchill that it was “time that he bagged something, and broke some crockery.”¹ Britain and France were about to declare war on the...