With the death of Rupert Brooke, his name became a legend. Like all legends, it has bred many falsehoods, yet neither the legend nor the falsehood can be explained by the short and simple record of his life. At Rugby and then at King's College, Cambridge, he was a brilliant scholar who was later elected a Fellow. He became a Socialist and a student impresario; he swam in the Cam at midnight with Virginia Woolf, naked and with complete innocence; he took part in the London society life of Edward Marsh, the Asquiths, Lady Ottoline Morrell, and Lady Diana Duff-Cooper; he travelled to America and Tahiti. As a writer he left only a hundred poems, some essays, a piece on Webster, a short play and the letters to his many friends, who were drawn to him by his exuberant personality and that extraordinary physical presence which led W. B. Yeats to describe him as 'the handsomest young man in England'. On April 21st, I9I5, he died from blood poisoning. He was buried in an olive grove on a Greek island, while his ship, the Grantully Castle, continued towards the massacre at Gallipoli. Brooke was, at once, the young artist separated from his future strengths, a young son countless families in bereavement felt they had lost, the unfulfilled man, even simply the face of beauty on a photograph schoolgirls still hide under their pillows. Fifty years on, his poetry is still read, his letters remain strangely moving, and the faded yellow snapshots of his friends in their summer camps before the ruin of the First World War retain a quality that is familiar, evocative and disturbing. This book explores what it is in the poet and in the name Rupert Brooke which seems to last, and which continues to remind us of parts of ourselves.