Dominic Sandbrook

He was described by W.B.

Yeats as the handsomest man in England.

I always find that kind of ludicrous.

Has Yeats seen every other man in England?

No, he hasn't.

Well, will it?

Brooke has already imagined his own death, of course, very famously.

Some of the most famous lines written in the First World War.

If I should die, think only this of me, that there is some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.

He will lead his men over the plain of Troy under beating sunshine.

The mosquito bite becomes infected and he dies of blood poisoning on the 23rd of April.

So he hasn't even seen an Ottoman defender.

He hasn't set foot on the soil of Asia.

He hasn't even got to the Gallipoli Peninsula.

He's dead before he's set off.

And, you know, this report in the newspapers, the Asquith family knew him very well.

They were devastated by this.

Churchill knew him, was devastated, wrote a absolutely sort of tear-stained, syrupy obituary for him, I think, in the Times article.

And you might say this is quite a bad omen that this bloke who was going to lead the kind of attack on Troy.

Yeah.