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Rupert Brooke - Life, Death and Myth

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Rupert Brooke - Life, Death and Myth

By: Nigel Jones
Narrated by: Richard Littledale
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About this listen

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.

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.

©2022 SAGA Egmont (P)2022 SAGA Egmont Art & Literature Authors Cultural & Regional England Mythology Biography
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This is a superb biography of Rupert Brooke, a beguiling, complex and often very difficult man. Nigel Jones has obviously read everything ever written by or about Brooke and the vibrant literary, social and political circles in which he lived. It would be a forlorn task to attempt to summarise the highlights here, I can only say that it's one of the most interesting biographies I have ever read.

The Audible information about this book states that the narrator is Richard Littledale but in the final moments of the book the narrator names himself as John Sackville. Whoever he is, he has a lovely voice and accent which are well suited to the subject matter and he reads the extracts of poetry beautifully. But, oh dear, his mispronunciation of Keynes is a bugbear from start to finish. He pronounces it to rhyme with 'means' when correctly pronounced it rhymes with 'mains'. This might be a minor point had the Keynes brothers not featured so prominently in Brooke's life, but they are mentioned so many times the 'means' pronunciation is a huge negative.

Compelling

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