Sassoon was a good poet at his best, and some of his prose works are still worth reading; nevertheless, the early years (1886-1918) covered in this biography are given nearly 600 pages, which seems excessive. The sensitive, aesthetic-minded young Jew from a wealthy background was transformed by the first World War into a fire-eater known to his men as "Mad Jack", whose exploits earned him an MC.
However he soon reacted against the slaughter of the Western Front and became a strident campaigner for peace, to the embarrassment of his family and the resentment of the top command. Jean Wilson is frank about Sassoon's homosexuality, against which he appears to have struggled strongly.