This biography of Siegfried Sassoon, one of the finest poets of the First World War, tells in full detail - for the first time - the story of his early life, covering the years from his birth in 1886 to the Armistice in 1918. One result of the long wait for this book is that it is now possible to tell Sassoon's story much more frankly than it would have been thirty years ago.

This is particularly true of his struggle to come to terms with his homosexuality, a conflict he wanted to describe himself, but which the law discouraged in his lifetime.

A descendant of merchant princes and farmer-artists, a Jew turned Catholic and a husband and father, he proves to be a complex and intriguing personality. At the same time shy and extremely impulsive, his poetry gave voice to all things that are quintessentially English.

He was one of the few War poets whose daring exploits at the Front earned him a Military Cross, as well as the epithet "Mad Jack." Nonetheless, this decorated war hero emerged as one of the angry young poets who denounced the War's continuation in his famous 1917 statement: "I believe that this War, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest."