As a war poet Sassoon has been heavily overshadowed by his protege Wilfrid Owen, which is rather unfair, though various critics claim that his later prose writings are what he will live by. This frank biography, which claims access to new material, depicts a cultivated aesthete born into wealth and leisure, who somehow became a war hero and then a pacifist (the British Government tried hard to have him declared insane when he denounced the war). His marriage was a tragic farce which did not last, and in the 1920s Sassoon mixed freely in homosexual circles and was credited with the seduction of a leading actor. This is a very readable study of a highly private figure who covered many of his tracks and late in life became a Catholic convert. He died a lonely man in 1967, with his reputation as a rebel and nonconformist long forgotten.