Siegfried Sassoon was born to a Jewish father and an Anglo-Catholic mother, and grew up in the neo-gothic mansion named Weirleigh (after its builder Harrison Weir) in Matfield, Kent.

Later, he was left a large legacy by an aunt, Rachel Beer, allowing him to buy the great estate of Heytesbury House in Wiltshire.

[6] For some years around 1910 he often played for Bluemantles Cricket Club, at the Nevill Ground, in Tunbridge Wells, sometimes alongside Arthur Conan Doyle.

[7] On 1 November, his younger brother Hamo was killed in the Gallipoli Campaign,[8] dying on board the ship Kildonan Castle after having had his leg amputated.

[9][failed verification] In the same month, Siegfried was sent to the 1st Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers, in France, where he met Robert Graves, and they became close friends.

Details such as rotting corpses, mangled limbs, filth, cowardice and suicide are all trademarks of his work at this time, and this philosophy of "no truth unfitting" had a significant effect on the movement towards Modernist poetry.

Sassoon's periods of duty on the Western Front were marked by exceptionally brave actions, including the single-handed capture of a German trench.

Armed with grenades, he scattered sixty German soldiers:[10]He went over with bombs in daylight, under covering fire from a couple of rifles, and scared away the occupants.

Deepening depression at the horror and misery the soldiers were forced to endure produced in Sassoon a paradoxically manic courage, and he was nicknamed "Mad Jack" by his men for his near-suicidal exploits.

One of the reasons for his violent anti-war feeling was the death of his friend David Cuthbert Thomas, who appears as "Dick Tiltwood" in the Sherston trilogy.

At the end of a spell of convalescent leave, Sassoon declined to return to duty; encouraged by pacifist friends such as Bertrand Russell and Lady Ottoline Morrell, he sent a letter to his commanding officer titled Finished with the War: A Soldier's Declaration.

[18] A manuscript copy of Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth containing Sassoon's handwritten amendments survives as testimony to the extent of his influence and is currently on display at London's Imperial War Museum.

[23] Having lived for a period at Oxford, where he spent more time visiting literary friends than studying, Sassoon dabbled briefly in the politics of the Labour movement.

[27] During his period at the Herald, Sassoon was responsible for employing several eminent names as reviewers, including E. M. Forster and Charlotte Mew, and commissioned original material from writers like Arnold Bennett and Osbert Sitwell.

He acquired a car, a gift from the publisher Frankie Schuster, and became renowned among his friends for his lack of driving skill, but this did not prevent him making full use of the mobility it gave him.

Sassoon had expressed his growing sense of identification with German soldiers in poems such as "Reconciliation" (1918),[28] and after the war, he travelled extensively in Germany, visiting the country a number of times over the next decade.

[30] In 1927 he travelled to Berlin and Dresden with Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, and in 1929 he accompanied Stephen Tennant on a trip to a sanatorium in the Bavarian countryside.

The deaths within a short space of time of three of his closest friends – Edmund Gosse, Thomas Hardy and Frankie Schuster – came as setbacks to his personal happiness.

The memoir, whose mild-mannered central character is content to do little more than be an idle country gentleman, playing cricket, riding and hunting foxes, is often humorous, revealing a side of Sassoon that had rarely been seen in his work during the war years.

Following the war he is believed to have had a succession of love affairs with men, including: Although Byam Shaw remained Sassoon's close friend throughout his life, only Tennant made a permanent impression.

Sensing a sympathetic nature, Sassoon confided in Hester about their relationship and, at her suggestion, wrote Tennant a letter to put the past to rest.

Siegfried's marriage broke down after the Second World War, with Sassoon apparently unable to find a compromise between the solitude he enjoyed and the companionship he needed.

Separated from his wife in 1945, Sassoon lived in seclusion at Heytesbury in Wiltshire, but he maintained contact with a circle which included E. M. Forster and J. R. Ackerley.

He also formed a close friendship with Vivien Hancock, then headmistress of Greenways School at Ashton Gifford House, Wiltshire, where his son George was a pupil.

[14] Intellectual exploration, aesthetic appeal, spiritual seeking, and the influence of figures like Ronald Knox were factors for Sassoon's decision to convert.

The CD also included comment on Sassoon by three of his Great War contemporaries: Edmund Blunden, Edgell Rickword and Henry Williamson.

[56] On 4 November 2009, it was reported that this purchase would be supported by £550,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, meaning that the University still needed to raise a further £110,000 on top of the money already received to meet the full £1.25 million asking price.

Included in the collection are war diaries kept by Sassoon while he served on the Western Front and in Palestine, a draft of "A Soldier's Declaration" (1917), notebooks from his schooldays and post-war journals.

In the poem "Atrocities", which concerned the killing of German prisoners of war by Allied troops, the early draft shows that some lines were cut and others diluted.

[64] In early 2019, it was announced in The Guardian that a student from the University of Warwick, whilst looking through Glen Byam Shaw's records at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, had serendipitously discovered a Sassoon poem addressed to the former, which had not been published in its entirety.